Could shrinking a key component make autonomous cars affordable?

Engineers and business leaders have been working on autonomous cars for years, but there's one big obstacle to making them cheap enough to become commonplace: They've needed a way to cut the cost of lidar, the technology that enables robotic navigation systems to spot and avoid pedestrians and other hazards along the roadway by bouncing light waves off these potential obstacles. After all, today's lidars use complex mechanical parts to send the flashlight-sized infrared lasers spinning around like the old-fashioned, bubblegum lights atop police cars -- at a cost of $8,000 to $30,000. But now a team led by electrical engineer Jelena Vuckovic is working on shrinking the mechanical and electronic components in a rooftop lidar down to a single silicon chip that she thinks could be mass produced for as little as a few hundred dollars. Jelena Vuckovic, the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership in the School of Engineering, professor of electrical engineering and, by courtesy, of applied physics. The project grows out of years of research by Vuckovic's lab to find a practical way to take advantage of a simple fact: Much like sunlight shines through glass, silicon is transparent to the infrared laser light used by lidar (short for light detection and ranging).