Ultrasonic lens cleaning brings camera reliability into focus
If you’ve ever watched a dog shake off water, then you’ve witnessed “four-legged physics” – the inspiration behind the world’s first purpose-built ultrasonic lens cleaning chipset.
In the same way a dog instinctively shakes itself clean, ultrasonic lens cleaning technology uses precisely controlled vibrations to self-clean camera lenses when they become dirty or wet. As our world becomes more automated, more cameras and sensors are added to cars, robots, factories and more. Since contaminants and moisture can obstruct camera vision and impair real-time decision-making, cleaning capabilities become increasingly critical.
“Around the summer of 2015, autonomous driving started to take off and there were predictions that we’d soon have 10-15 cameras on the average car,” said Dave Magee, an engineer in Kilby Labs, our company’s applied research lab. “That raises a very practical question: How do you keep them all clean?”
Traditional cleaning solutions, such as water or compressed air sprayers, become increasingly complicated to install and maintain when you need to route water and air lines to lenses all around the car. Dave began investigating whether ultrasonic vibrations might provide a purely electrical means to keep camera lenses clean.
“By using an electro-mechanical component called a piezoelectric transducer, we can create small vibrations invisible to the human eye,” said Avi Yashar, a product marketing engineer who works on the ultrasonic lens cleaning project. “A lens has a natural frequency at which it vibrates, and by applying ultrasonic vibrations specifically at that frequency, the glass will shake vigorously on a microscopic level, expelling visible contaminants such as water or dirt resting on the surface.”
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