Lidar systems use pulses of infrared light to measure distance and map a 3D scene with high resolution, allowing autonomous vehicles to rapidly react to obstacles that appear in their path. But traditional lidar sensors are expensive, bulky systems with many moving parts that degrade over time, limiting how the sensors can be deployed.

A new study from MIT researchers could help to enable next-generation lidar sensors that are compact, durable, and have no moving parts. The key advance is a novel design for a silicon-photonics chip, which is a semiconductor device that manipulates light rather than electricity.

Typically, such silicon-photonics chip-based systems have a restricted field of view, so a silicon-photonics-based lidar would not be able to scan angles in the periphery. Existing workarounds to this problem increase noise and hamper precision.

The GSN SNN 4−10−30−2 is a hardware based spiking neural network that can autonomous control a remote control robot vehicle. There are 10 artificial neurons and 30 artificial synapses, and is built on 16 full-size breadboards. Four infrared proximity sensor are used on top of the vehicle to determine how far it is away from objects and walls. The sensor data is used as inputs into the first later of neurons.

A full circuit level diagram of the neural network is provided, as well as an architecture diagram. The weights on the network are set based on the resistance value. The synapses allow the weights to be set as excitatory or inhibitory.

Testing of the network went great and the robot had much smoother control than previous testing as the output now has an analog output.

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As technology advances, and the demand for faster, higher-bandwidth, and more energy-efficient data processing continues to grow, scientists and engineers search for ways to improve electronic systems. One avenue they have been exploring is optoelectronics—the study and application of electronic devices that interface with light by detecting, emitting, or converting it into electrical signals.

Optoelectronics offers significant advantages over conventional electronics, including faster speed, higher bandwidth, lower power consumption, and improved reliability.

One particularly promising direction in optoelectronics has been the development of the photonic integrated circuit—an optical microchip that uses light (photons) instead of electricity (electrons) to sense, process, and transmit information. These optical chips are already being used in many advanced technologies today, such as high-speed fiber-optic communications, data center interconnects, sensors for autonomous vehicles, and hardware accelerators for machine learning and artificial intelligence.