Developing a new product starts with a pretty clear idea of what you expect the finished thing to do. Mathematically, you can can work out the expected performance and logically you can understand how this performance translates into useful applications. But I’m always fascinated by the qualitative feel of a product, that intangible experience that makes you think “Wow, that is so cool!”

I’d like to share a few experiences that I had during the testing of our new SF30 laser range finder. We decided to make a laser sensor that could measure so fast that even narrow obstacles like overhead power cables could be detected reliably, even from a moving UAV. Additionally, we wanted the SF30 to produce high density point clouds when used in a scanning system. We felt that without this high level of performance, reliable obstacle detection and collision avoidance would be impossible.

Quantitatively, we knew that the SF30 could measure 36633 times per second. What we didn’t know was how that “felt” in practice. The yellow ‘scope trace above shows the data output from the serial port of the SF30. The baud rate is 921600 and on the blue trace you can see a synchronization marker.

Looking at this high speed data stream for the first time, we couldn’t get a feeling for what an obstacle with a high relative velocity would look like. We were also concerned that there weren’t many embedded processing platforms available that could make obstacle detection decisions within the 27 microseconds between readings, whilst flying a UAV.

So we added an old fashioned analog output with an alarm that has a programmable activation distance. In the image below the yellow line is an analog representation of the measured distance and the blue line is an active low alarm that warns of a close obstacle.

Qualitatively, this is a much clearer picture of an obstacle than the earlier data stream and we can see that the obstacle was in front of the SF30 for about 4 milliseconds. So here’s the cool part. The obstacle is an elastic band flicked at full force through the laser beam. The band was traveling at about 20 meters per second and the SF30 hit it 137 times.

My immediate response to this result was – this is going to work! My intuitive understanding of what it takes to hit a small obstacle from a fast moving platform is that you need to hit it lots of times to be absolutely certain that it is a real threat. Hitting the fastest thing that I could find 137 times is just amazing.

Of course, the next issue is how the host controller is going to catch a fast alarm signal. Certainly much more easily than a fast data stream but how about latching the alarm until the controller is ready to acknowledge it? In the image below, the blue alarm line has stayed low after the obstacle detection event. The alarm is reset by a command from the host sent through the serial port.

So now we end up with a remarkable solution to detecting obstacles that have a high relative velocity. On the one hand, the SF30 can measure even small obstacles many times no matter how fast they are moving. On the other hand, a simple alarm signal can warn the UAV about the presence of an obstacle without occupying all the processing capacity of the flight controller.

SOURCE: Everyone’s Blog Posts – DIY Drones – Read entire story here.