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The third place team from UW – Madison and WPI, invented a LiDAR-based tunnel inspection automation system. With this tool, the inspection of the functionality and safety of tunnels and pipelines can be more easily monitored with less dependence on human labor in hazardous environments.
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Finally, the team from UA received an honorable mention for their innovative product that aims to decrease the cost of precise 3D scanning by utilizing a novel application of 2D LiDAR technology.
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“LiDAR is somewhat of a special technology, and these projects help bring it to the masses,” said SICK, Inc. CEO Tony Peet. “All of our participants this year have strong business cases to bring innovative ideas to the market.”
Contest Background
Each team was asked to submit a video and paper for judging upon completion of the project. A panel of judges decided the winning submissions based on creativity and innovation, ability to solve a customer problem, commercial potential to productize and market the application, entrepreneurship of the team, and reporting.
The three winning teams win a cash award of $10K for first place, $5K for second place, and $3K for third place. In addition to bragging rights and the cash prize, the first place team, along with the advising professor, will go on an all-expense paid trip to Germany to visit the SICK headquarters and manufacturing facility.
LiDAR Sensor Technology
The LiDAR sensor (TiM) provided to teams utilizes a rotating pulsed laser to calculate distances to its surroundings based on the time-of-flight principle. The rotating laser effectively forms a circle around the TiM, inside which users can create individual fields to monitor for the presence or absence of an object. The reliability of the sensor is improved by SICK’s patented High-Definition Distance Measurement (HDDM) technology, which samples each measurement several times and averages the results.
As the TiM$10K teams ably proved, monitoring the individual fields for objects can be a great way to solve applications that other sensing technologies cannot. This makes the TiM invaluable in a variety of industrial applications, as well as building automation, stationary, and mobile applications. In addition, the integrated Ethernet interface allows for remote monitoring, measurement, and navigation which presented a ton of creative possibilities for the TiM$10K teams.