ThermoDAR

For semi and full-autonomous vehicles, detecting environment precisely in any condition is crucial. RADAR and LiDAR technologies suffer under challenging situations such as heavy rain, snow and smoke. Also backreflections and glare introduce severe errors. Thermal radiation that corresponds to 8-14 micron wavelength, would come up from all the objects around. Depending on the composition of material and temperature, ThermoDAR detects the range of objects via divergence amount of incident rays on sensor plane. Far objects would diverge more on the sensor module. This information is very beneficial to directly find the distance. The optical desing of the sensor module is novel to this work and also applicable on other cameras. With a single module, distance of objects could be obtained in high accuracy when LiDAR and RADAR modules suffer. Because no illumination is required, sensor module not goes saturation unlike the other technologies.