Vision: Photonics for farmland care
Optical technologies will make a significant contribution to improving agricultural processes and sustainability. In future, optical systems are expected to enforce or even replace visual inspection by farmers.
PhoenixD envisions miniaturised optical 5D sensors that can be deployed onto un-manned aerial vehicles, enabling large-scale multi- and hyperspectral imaging of crop fields in addition to the use of processing drones (e.g. fertilising). The corresponding sensor data will be used to create sophisticated distribution maps including e.g. soil humidity, potential hazards like pest or diseases, and nutrition at a per-crop level.
This will facilitate smart farming towards resource-efficient application of water or fertilisers and higher crop yield to fight the challenges associated with climate change-driven environmental degradation and the ever-growing global population, respectively. Smart farming will be based on a cooperation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and ground-based vehicles.
Vision: Adaptive sensor networks for (predictive) analytics
Today, sensors are used in many different ways - for measuring the concentration of trace gases, monitoring water quality, and measuring small magnetic fields or local gravity. Photonic and quantum systems play a key role.
The future lies in many distributed sensors that communicate with each other to realise a large dynamic overview of the environment. This will allow, for example, for vehicles to ‘look around the corner’, and predict traffic situations or for scientists to monitor the distribution and movement of pollutants or viruses in sewage, seismic dynamics, and brain waves with high spatial resolution. Today’s high-performance precision sensors are complex, large, and expensive; they sometimes contain toxic substances, and are not interconnected. The future lies in low-cost, mass-produced, small hybrid sensors that are self-sufficient in energy and do not need to be dis-posed of as hazardous waste at the end of their life cycle.
Future sensors will be based on integrated adaptive photonics. They will carry the intelligence for local data analysis on board and allow networking for realising real-time sensor data maps.
Vision: Photonic Neural Networks
Photonic systems are promising candidates for the next generation of artificial neural networks, as they provide ultrafast, high-bandwidth processing and low power consumption for applications as versatile as speech recognition, image classification, or computer vision. Challenges such as weak optical nonlinear activation, impractical concepts for integrated photonic hardware and the lack of suitable optical storage limit the progress in this area.
PhoenixD will approach these challenges by exploring novel matter-light interactions and new materials for real-time operating systems. A 5D photonics concept will allow a decisive step towards biologically inspired neural networks with synoptic plasticity. Versatile photonic hardware for the new generation of intelligent all-op-tical computing will be provided on different photonic hardware platforms.
