Sensors could help cut the cost of groceries
A compact, lightweight sensor system with infrared imaging capabilities could be easily fitted to a drone for remote crop monitoring
The prototype sensor system, which comprises a filter made with a thin layer of a material called vanadium dioxide that can switch between edge detection and detailed infrared imaging, was engineered by TMOS Chief Investigator Professor Madhu Bhaskaran and her team at RMIT in Melbourne.
“Materials such as vanadium dioxide add a fantastic tuning capability to render devices ‘smart'”, she said.
“When the temperature of the filter is changed, the vanadium dioxide transforms from an insulating state to a metallic one, which is how the processed image shifts from a filtered outline to an unfiltered infrared image.”
“These materials could go a long way in futuristic flat-optics devices that can replace technologies with traditional lenses for environmental sensing applications—making them ideal for use in drones and satellites, which require low size, weight and power capacity.
RMIT holds a granted US patent and has a pending Australian patent application for its method of producing vanadium dioxide films, which may be suitable for a broad range of applications.
Lead author Dr. Michele Cotrufo said the system’s ability to switch between processing operations, from edge detection to capturing detailed infrared images, was significant.
This research by engineers at the City University of New York (CUNY), the University of Melbourne, RMIT University and the ARC Center of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) is published in Nature Communications in a paper titled “Reconfigurable image processing metasurfaces with phase-change materials.”
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