Unmanned Systems Technology 038 l Skyeton Raybird-3 l Data storage l Sea-Kit X-Class USV l USVs insight l Spectronik PEM fuel cells l Blue White Robotics UVIO l Antennas l AUVSI Xponential Virtual 2021 report

14 Platform one Dr Donough Wilson Dr Wilson is innovation lead at aviation, defence, and homeland security innovation consultants, VIVID/futureVision. His defence innovations include the cockpit vision system that protects military aircrew from asymmetric high-energy laser attack. He was first to propose the automatic tracking and satellite download of airliner black box and cockpit voice recorder data in the event of an airliner’s unplanned excursion from its assigned flight level or track. For his ‘outstanding and practical contribution to the safer operation of aircraft’ he was awarded The Sir James Martin Award 2018/19, by the Honourable Company of Air Pilots. Paul Weighell Paul has been involved with electronics, computer design and programming since 1966. He has worked in the real-time and failsafe data acquisition and automation industry using mainframes, minis, micros and cloud- based hardware on applications as diverse as defence, Siberian gas pipeline control, UK nuclear power, robotics, the Thames Barrier, Formula One and automated financial trading systems. Ian Williams-Wynn Ian has been involved with unmanned and autonomous systems for more than 20 years. He started his career in the military, working with early prototype unmanned systems and exploiting imagery from a range of unmanned systems from global suppliers. He has also been involved in ground-breaking research including novel power and propulsion systems, sensor technologies, communications, avionics and physical platforms. His experience covers a broad spectrum of domains from space, air, maritime and ground, and in both defence and civil applications including, more recently, connected autonomous cars. Unmanned Systems Technology’s consultants Xenomatix has launched a cost-reduced version of its Lidar sensor for driverless cars and other unmanned systems (writes Nick Flaherty). The XenoLidar-X design cuts the number of printed circuit boards from six to two, and enhances the optical path. As a result, the new Lidar consumes 12 W with a 0.15 º resolution in both horizontal and vertical directions over a range of 150 m. This will bring down the cost of the Lidar sensor head to the same as that for a stereo camera unit, around e 100, said Filip Geuens, CEO of Xenomatix. This opens up new distributed sensor architectures. The design uses an array of 15,000 VCSEL vertical semiconductor laser diodes to generate collimated beams to illuminate a scene. “We do not need as many VCSELs as we have beams, and we have a design that is not linked to one supplier – our automotive customers like that,” Geuens said. “We have to distribute the available energy over multiple beams, so we generate tens of thousands of beams with enough energy in each beam to cover long distances, and we make measurements on multiple pulses. “We think we have found the compromise between flash sensors and scanning beams. We illuminate everything at the same time but scan and collimate the energy in small beams.” The reflections from the lasers are captured by a custom image sensor designed by Xenomatix but built on a standard CMOS chip process. The output of the sensor is captured in one frame rather than scanning each line of the sensor, so a global shutter is used, and the output is processed by a standard graphics processor from Nvidia. The company has developed different sensor heads that work with the same back-end GPU processor that can be supplied by Xenomatix or in a central processing unit from another supplier. “We have the same resolution throughout the range of sensors – we can do digital zoom but our view is that there will be multiple Lidars in a vehicle so there are different variants of the sensor,” said Geuens. “With the Xact variant of the sensor it is possible to have wider, 60 º FoV with lower resolution, and two of them give the 120 º FoV that customers are asking for,” Geuens said. Using low-cost sensor heads also saves on repair costs. For example, if a windscreen or headlamp with the sensor is damaged, only the sensor heads need to be replaced, rather than the processor. That has been an important factor for companies such as Marelli and AGC, who supply subsystems for driverless cars. Low-priced Lidar Sensors June/July 2021 | Unmanned Systems Technology The XenoLidar-X for UGVs is expected to cost about e 100