Professor Kyi Hwan Park successfully commercializes Korea's first compact scanning laser

□ Professor Kyi Hwan Park of the School of Mechanical Engineering at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST • President Seung Hyeon Moon) has succeeded in commercializing a compact lidar in Korea for the first time that can measure 2D maps, 3D shapes, and other things.

∘ Despite the difficulty of applying technology developed at GIST directly to industrial application, Professor Kyi Hwan Park's Sensor and Actuator Laboratory has completed 10 years of research and developed the TRL (technical maturity level) to 8 levels of measurement up to distances of 80m, making it directly applicable for robots, drones, and automobiles.

 

□ With the recent expansion of the smart car industry, demand for the development of Lidar *, which is used as a core component of autonomous vehicles and unmanned vehicles, is greatly increasing.

* Lidar is based on the principle that a pulsed laser beam can be reflected by an object and the return time is proportional to the distance. Lidar is considered to be an essential component for autonomous vehicles because it can determine precise and detailed shapes with high spatial resolution * at further distances when compared with other sensors that have been used to recognize objects or pedestrian, such as cameras, ultrasound, or radar.

* Resolution is the minimum distance between two objects in order to identify two objects that are almost overlapping.

□ With an advanced signal processing component and algorithm, the developed lidar system is expected to be used by autonomous vehicles because it can cope with cope with outdoor temperature and sunlight changes.  It is also characterized by the ability to improve the accuracy by using techniques that reduce the distance error that varies depending on reflectivity, such as the color or material of the object. In addition, with a patented structure that enables better miniaturization, it is possible for the system to be competitive in advanced countries with high barriers for new technology.

□ Professor Kyi Hwan Park said, "Besides being used by robots, drones, or vehicles, the developed lidar system can be applied to a variety of industries, such as for security, surveillance, and safety where it can be used to prevent  vessel collisions at port, to measure the height of cranes at container loading and unloading stations, to reconstruct digital 3D geometry, and it can be used in virtual games and other industrial applications such as machinery, shipbuilding, civil engineering, construction, games and entertainment.

∘ Recently, the world market of Lidar has been growing rapidly, and the forecast is that it will reach $630 million by 2020.