A new laser scanner unit developed by Terranet is now in lab testing. The first prototype has been assessed at the company’s premises in Lund, Sweden, in conjunction with the company’s existing event camera technology.
According to the company, the scanner demonstrated excellent performance by effectively detecting and visualizing objects within a range of 5-30m. Testing was done under indoor fluorescent lighting conditions. The laser scanner operated five near-infrared laser beams at a peak power of 60W total, and a repetition rate of 400kHz.
“During the laser scanner prototype testing, we were very pleased to showcase the exceptional but expected capabilities of the eye-safe BlincVision system. It effectively filters out ambient noise and irrelevant data, focusing solely on clearly outlined objects. The sensor continuously provides precise time-stamped 2D shapes as an output stream, which are further triangulated into a 4D scene by BlincVision’s computing unit. We successfully demonstrated that our vision software is capable of capturing, processing, and forwarding events triggered by five simultaneously arriving laser beams in real time,” explained Nihat Küçük, CTO of Terranet.
The laser scanner is a vital component of Terranet’s BlincVision system, which combines laser scanning, event cameras and vision software to create real-time 4D images of road objects. This testing phase is said to be a major milestone toward integration of the system into vehicles.