3D Ultrasonic Object Detections with >1 Meter Range

This paper reports an ultrasonic 3D object detector with > 1 meter range based on an AlN piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (pMUTs) chip. Compared with the state-of-art technologies, three distinctive advancements have been achieved: (1) more than 1-meter in sensing distance enabled by a bimorph dual electrode pMUT design; (2) small form factor (6×6 mm2) and a more than 135° field of view; (3) capability of real time 3D object detection with up to 125 fps (frames per second) based on the scheme of ultrasound beamforming. As such, this work could open up a new class of miniaturized, low-power, real-time 3D object detections for applications such as drone navigation, machine vision and so on.