iRobot Licenses Flash LADAR from Advanced Scientific Concepts for PackBots

iRobot, Massachusetts maker of the Roomba home-vacuuming robot as well as military PackBots, struck a deal in January with the California firm Advanced Scientific Concepts (ASC) to develop and market ASC’s flash LADAR (laser detection and ranging) technology for military purposes. The laser camera can be mounted on manned and unmanned ground vehicles and iRobot’s PackBots. PackBots are remote-controlled, lightweight, and durable robots that can travel as fast as five miles per hour and lift up to 15 pounds. They have been in use in Afghanistan since 2002 and in Iraq since 2003. Flash LADAR, with mapping and navigation applications, is essentially a better artificial eye with more accurate depth perception. It will give the robots greater autonomy and effectiveness. The iRobot team anticipates having a prototype ready by the end of the year and production models available in 2009.

LADAR is a form of optical sensing technology that measures properties of scattered light to gather information about a distant target object or area. It has been in use for many years in construction, historic preservation, meteorology and atmospheric research, and mapping, as well as industrial and military applications. Like radar, the technology measures the delay between the transmission of the pulse and the detection of its reflected signal. Radar sound frequencies, however, produce significant reflections from metallic objects, whereas nonmetallic objects produce weaker reflections, and some materials produce no detectable reflection at all and are invisible to radar. Unlike radar, LADAR uses pulses of laser light, emitted in the thousands per second. It can detect objects of metallic and nonmetallic materials, and it is effective even for minute particles such as aerosols and molecules.

The ASC flash LADAR technology is an advancement beyond the previous generation of LADAR because, rather than using laser scanning to send thousands of pulses per second to generate an image, flash LADAR emits a single burst of diffuse laser light to return real-time, movie-like images with 3-D depth. On its return, the reflected signal is the rendered 20 times to create the color-coded image. The 20-nonasecond eye-safe pulse cannot be seen by night vision or standard cameras, which makes it more stealthy. The system is solid-state, which makes it more reliable in rough terrain, and it is capable of seeing through dust, smoke, darkness, and smog, and even through water, foliage, and partially open Venetian blinds. It can see for a distance of more than a mile with 3-cm resolution on the 128 x 128 array.

With the ultimate goal of saving the lives of warfighters, the flash-LADAR-loaded PackBots can be used by the military for intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance, to clear caves, search buildings and bunkers, and detect antipersonnel mines. The flash LADAR advance is seen as a step toward robots that will operate independently from warfighters controlling them remotely during battle and toward autonomously driven vehicles that can penetrate dangerous terrain while warfighters remain at a safe standoff distance.

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