Next-Generation 3-D Ultrasound: Transforming Autonomous Mobility and Robotics

BRISTOL, United Kingdom

Calyo is pushing the boundaries of robotics and autonomous mobility with our groundbreaking 3-D ultrasound technology. We’re engaging across industries – from warehouses to drones to self-driving cars – to bring next-generation close-range perception to life.

For Calyo, scaling autonomous mobility means ensuring that technology works everywhere – beyond ideal lab conditions. With Pulse, we’re setting a new standard for resilient sensing in robotics and self-driving applications.

Calyo is actively engaging across several industries to bring next-generation 3-D ultrasound to robotics applications. Our Pulse sensors are aimed at revolutionising close-range, low cost perception by targeting object detection, collision avoidance and SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping) applications across a wide variety of autonomous platforms.

In close collaboration with our partners, Calyo recently demonstrated these sensors are more than viable for use in self-driving road vehicles, for use cases involving parking, heavy traffic and low speed city driving.

Take, for instance, this video about how the Calyo team integrated Pulse with a self driving car’s ROS2 based perception stack.

Here, you can see that Calyo’s ultrasound-enabled sensor system is able to detect obstacles even when the LiDAR sensor data is completely cut-off, simulating what we mean when we say next-generation redundancy.

From our discussions with companies specialising in industrial applications, we learned that they often only use 2-D LiDAR because of the price and computational cost of their 3-D alternatives.

This may be fine for navigation and basic mapping, but poses questions about how the autonomous platform can adapt and respond to dynamic environments. 2-D LiDAR is not sufficient to deal with the wide variety of 3-D obstacles that may impede a robot’s progress during navigation tasks. This is where Calyo’s Pulse sensors come in.

In a warehouse-like environment, Calyo proved that these sensors are suitable for detecting unforeseen obstacles in a dynamic 3-D environment. What’s more, the ROS2 path planning algorithm is able to automatically adjust based on the real-time sensor data.

As Calyo has shown, it is now feasible for logistics automation companies to develop their robotic platforms to respond to complex, 3-D environments without investing heavily in expensive and resource-consuming LiDAR technology.

It is an exciting time to be working in this space!

Want to learn more about how Calyo’s next-generation 3-D ultrasound sensing is powering the future of robotics and mobility? Get in touch!