FEATURED ARTICLE 35th Annual ICALEO
Bridging the Gap Between Academia & Industry
BY DEBBIE SNIDERMAN The 35th
Electro-Optics (ICALEO®
International Congress on Applications of Lasers & ) took place at the Sheraton®
San Diego
Hotel and Marina this October, 2016. With a highly engaged group of attendees and a great mix of veterans in the field, students and new attendees, ICALEO met its goals of bridging the gap between academia and industry,
highlighting new
developments in laser technology, and providing a platform for global networking.
“This year’s ICALEO exceeded all expectations once again,” said Jim Naugle, Marketing Director of LIA. “The great location helped increase attendance from 2015. With 415 attendees from 20 different countries, with around 80 percent from academia and 20 percent from industry, you can see why this conference is so unique.”
Congress Technical Highlights Congress General Chair Silke Pflueger put together unquestionably the best plenary talks ever delivered at an ICALEO conference so far.
Nina Lanza from Los Alamos National Laboratory linked all humanity together in her opening plenary talk about the laser riding around in a vehicle on Mars. Since 2012, the laser in the ChemCam instrument aboard the Mars Science Lab ‘Curiosity’ rover has brought Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) analysis capabilities and chemical analysis data back to Earth. Along with a Remote Micro Imaging camera, the ChemCam data has provided good signs for habitability of the planet. With its small 350-500 µm spot size, it is able to measure features up to 7 meters away from the rover and ablates material to perform depth sampling by pulsing, revealing “big results” that smectite clays are present underneath the red rocks on the surface of Mars and that dust all over the planet is hydrated. It is also showing the presence of methane, indicating that Mars is not a dead planet; it is active and full of surprises.
Next, Jim McBride from Ford Motor Company talked about the challenges of sensing on fully autonomous vehicles. Ford is developing a fleet of vehicles where a driver has no responsibility of driving, with the goal of having commercially available fully autonomous vehicles in 2021 and cost affordable vehicles
14 LIATODAY FOCUS: YEAR END REVIEW NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016
McBride showed how 95-99 percent of autonomous driving can be done with input from LiDAR scanners alone. Reading what he calls the pavement’s unique fingerprint: manhole covers, lane markings, tar strips, cracks and all details in a road, localizing the vehicle, the road, and obstacles, centering it within a few cm on the road, tracking obstacles and avoiding collisions is simple for LiDAR. Its data is overlaid on top of high definition 3D maps with road data that has the rules of the road, crosswalks, road signs and other important features, to make sure the road is traversable, using prior knowledge to identify what’s coming ahead and difficult topologies. It has its own light source and isn’t susceptible to shadows and the sun, unlike monocular cameras. And it is much better at tracking other vehicles than with Radar alone, which is noisy. Redundancy helps filter out echoes from challenges such as snow or heavy rain that may obscure the ground plane. With real-time planning without GPS, the laser scanners calculate where to go. But, there are some areas where it doesn’t suffice.
Sensor fusion helps in challenging situations: high closing velocities on two-lane highways when it’s hard to see objects coming, adverse weather and lighting, snow obscuring optics preventing the laser from making it to the ground plane, road debris, and human-negotiated arrangements like four-way stops and merge ramps. In merge scenarios with line of sight issues, sensing has to look in 360 degrees. When turning left or accelerating on a highway on ramp, thousands of possible trajectories are calculated, looking back in time for decision making. But, when fusing LiDAR scanners with other sensors, each still sees only part of the picture.
Albert Lazzarini, Deputy Director of LIGO Laboratory at California Institute of Technology presented the exciting new results about black holes made from the first gravitational waves detected by LIGO. The system involves an extremely stable laser injected into a complex cavity of a Fabry-Perot interferometer
in 2026. He explained the three types of sensors used on autonomous vehicles: Radar, cameras and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scanners. He showed videos of the Ford Fusion Hybrid research vehicle driving completely autonomously on a recent successful 125 mile highway test through the Arizona/ California desert using only the LiDAR scanners to image surroundings in a 360 degree view around the car at all times.
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