Smart city 3D sensing and sensor communications

SEMI, USA held a conference today on sensorization of smart cities: Smart city 3D sensing and sensor communications.

Lidar as key sensor
Dr. Mark McCord, CTO, Cepton Technologies, spoke about lidar as a key sensor for smart city infrastructure. Lidar or light detection and ranging is transforming the smart infrastructure. It is used for roads, tolling, and rail, as well as crowd analytics, security, and safety.

Cepton is deploying high-performance, mass-market lidar for safety and autonomy across multiple industries. Lidar uses lasers. Cepton uses 905 nm wavelength edge-emitting lasers, and uses direct time-of-flight approach. It uses micro-motion technology (MMT) for imaging. It has breakthrough MMT for lidar imaging. Cepton has automotive-grade and industrial-grade lidar sensors. It has the Helius smart lidar system. High-resolution lidar imaging is used for intelligent perception. We can add more intelligence to this.

He gave an example of smart cities use case with Alp.Lab. There is real-time 3D vehicle and pedestrian tracking. Another is at Orlando International Airport with Indoor Labs Safe Place platform. It is powering Synect’s Evenflow Crowd Radar media lights at the airport. Finally, there is Sora tolling use case with Redfox ID deployed on a major US highway. Sora allows vehicle profiling.

Smart city and IoT apps
Dr. Fikret Sivrikaya, Research Director, GT-ARC Technical University, Berlin, talked about sensor communications for smart city and IoT applications. You can equip anything with a computation unit, sensor, and a communication unit. Add some intelligent software! Eg., smart garbage collection is optimized and leads to less fuel consumption and reduced noise pollution.

Today, telecom has been connecting everything. The IoT device can be used in manufacturing machines, trash containers, etc. Smart city concept uses IoT technologies to improve the cities. The physical world is bridged with the digital world. IoT devices/sensors allow apps and data for more services. There are many app scenarios with highly varying communication needs. URLLC leads to critical IoT, and MMT communications leads to massive IoT.

There are many options for IoT connectivity that works over low-power WANs (LPWANs). There is also the LoRaWAN, and NB-IoT. LPWAN can also be used for massive IoT. LPWAN is on the rise for IoT. LoRa and NB-IoT have larger market share. LoRa ((long range), is a low-power, wide area physical-layer networking protocol for IoT. LoRaWan is based on LoRa, and helps realize large-scale IoT apps. It uses unlicensed frequency bands within 433-915MHz range at 125/250 KHz channels. Various ISM bands are available for LoRa. LoRaWAN packets from an end node are received and forwarded by all gateways in range.

There is also narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). It builds on the LTE ecosystem amd can be deployed as simple software addition. LoRaWAN and NB-IoT are the two prominent standards in use.

Paul Carey, Director, MEMS and Sensors Industry Group, SEMI, was the moderator.