An 8-ch LIDAR Receiver Based on TDC With Multi-Interval Detection and Real-Time $In~Situ$ Calibration

Abstract

This article presents an 8-ch LIDAR receiver for pulsed time-of-flight (TOF) imaging laser detection and ranging application. The proposed LIDAR receiver can achieve both 100 m and high-precision range imaging with lower system cost, which was untrodden with conventional LIDARs. The time-to-digital converter (TDC) with multi-intervals detection is used to measure the TOF and eliminate the walking error. Spatial Savitzky-Golay smoothing filter (SSGSF) is used to improve measuring range and precision of the LIDAR system, which is based on mixed timing sampling (MTS). The MTS is realized by TDC, analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with 200-MS/s sampling rate, and mixed interpolation algorithm. Based on the proposed LIDAR receiver, extensive experiments have been performed to verify the performance of the LIDAR receiver. The ranging precision of the LIDAR receiver is 40 mm when the rising time of the echo signal is 3 ns and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is 10. Furthermore, the LIDAR receiver achieves a measurement range of 100 m with a peak power of 30 W and an execution time of 2.4 μs for a complete measurement.