Evaluation of robustness against external vibrations for long-range MEMS lidar with one-dimensional resonant micromirror

Abstract

We describe the verification of a long-range one-dimensional (1D) scanning micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) lidar specifically considering the robustness against external vibration influences. The 1D scanning MEMS lidar exploits a multichannel horizontal line laser to scan the scene vertically for a 10 deg × 11 deg horizontal and vertical field of view at a frame rate of up to 29 Hz. To evaluate the robustness against vibrations, a vibration evaluation setup is developed to apply a wideband vibration based on the automotive standard LV124. The vibration tests are performed in three conditions open loop without control and two phase-locked loops (PLLs) with default and high gain settings. The test results demonstrate that vibration can cause wobbly distortion along the scan angle in the open loop case and the PLLs can suppress effectively this influence in the mean and standard deviation of the standard point to surface error up to 69.3% and 90.0%, respectively. This verifies the benefits of the MEMS mirror control, ensuring stable point cloud measurements under vibrations in harsh automotive environments.