Galvos GUI Control
During the summer of 2019 I joined in a BU-MIT lab for research. The lab owner is my probabilistic class’s professor, and the group I was in focuses a field called photon-efficient imaging, that is, to use only one photon per pixel to reconstruct a fairly accurate scene. This could have many potentials in fields like military or self-driving cars where fast sensing in dark or quick moving environment is essential.
However, my proudest work during the research was not some intelligent play, but making a series of GUI to control the experimental apparatus, and they have been used by the group even until today.
Background
As figures 1-3 on the left shows, the research aims to use a Lidar and the Galvo mirror to scan an object in several different patterns, and try to reconstruct the object and depth with as little as information (photons) needed. One crucial mechanical/electrical component of this experiment are the galvo mirrors in the middle of the figure, which controls the direction of the light beam and thus the motion of the geometric pattern.
During the past, the controlling of the Galvos mirror and the Lidar has been a pain as the researchers needs to hard-coding each point in a script. The prep might take an hour, and the code written by one user might not be easily transported into another member’s work. This was specially proven to be an issue after a new PhD researcher joined in during the second half of the term, and the raw code wrote for controlling the Lidar system by the previous members created much obstacles for transition and showcasing. Therefore, I decided to migrate all the codes together, and created some kind of Matlab GUI that can perform scanning in any geometry in a few clicking of the buttons. That was the start of my project.
GUI Design
Another important task during my intern was to migrate the old codes and came up with some sorts of GUI for better controlling of the Galvos mirrors.