Ming C. Wu (Advisor)

Within the past few decades, the goal of fully-autonomous vehicles has moved from a thought experiment to a potential reality thanks to advances in machine intelligence. One of the key challenges to still be overcome is the building of robotic perception systems which can achieve performance on-par with or surpassing that of humans. Currently, most autonomous driving researchers rely on several different modalities for collecting visual information, namely lidar, radar, and cameras. Although relying on lidar for perception has the drawback of high cost, maturing lidar technology has opened...

Three-dimensional (3D) imaging sensors allow machines to perceive, map and interact with the surrounding world1. The size of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) devices is often limited by mechanical scanners. Focal plane array-based 3D sensors are promising candidates for solid-state LiDARs because they allow electronic scanning without mechanical moving parts. However, their resolutions have been limited to 512 pixels or smaller2. In this paper, we report on a 16,384-pixel LiDAR with a wide field of view (FoV, 70° × 70°), a fine addressing resolution (0.6° × 0.6°), a narrow beam...