This work provides a robust example of a 3D lidar system that is ideal for small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and robots, but that could also find significant applications in gaming and in gathering data for 3D printers. This new type of monostatic lidar will be very useful for short range, low cost applications. It requires no alignment. Further, it uses a scan pattern that tends to emphasize the central region of the scan, so it is as if the lidar had foveated vision, focusing more of its surveillance time in the central region. Certainly, for a small UAV or a robot this is a great feature. The human eye evolved foveated vision because it is very useful for a person to spend more resources focused where the eye is looking, tapering off away from the center of the field of view. Another interesting feature of the system presented in this Applied Optics article is the silicon-based position detector that allows the authors to tell where the lidar is pointing by using two-photon absorption as the light is emitted. This is a short pulse illuminator, so intensity is sufficiently high to obtain some two-photon absorption on transmission. This in turn allows us to know where the laser is pointing, but does not cause much loss in the lidar. This short-range lidar system should be inexpensive, and the fact that it is essentially foviated makes it ideal for short range robots and UAVs.

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