Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar

The company steers its beam with what it characterizes as a truly solid-state technology, as compared to the conspicuous moving parts of Velodyne, with its rotating rooftop tower; the large mirror-steered beam of Luminar; and even the tiny MEMs mirrors that control the scanning for Innoviz and other companies. Lumotive shines a beam on a liquid-crystal “metamaterial” that has tiny tunable components, each of which can be used to slow down one part of the laser beam with respect to another part. “They inject a laser beam into a waveguide on a chip, split the beam into other waveguides, pass each part through a phase shifter, then couple the light out of the chip to form the beam,” Akselrod says.

Source: spectrum.ieee.org