Design and Implementation of Power Supply of High-Power Diode Laser of LiDAR Onboard UAV

A small cost-low civilian UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle UAV) platform usually requests that all carried components should be light in weight, small in volume, and efficient in energy. A laser diode adopted in LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) system is often driven by pulsed voltage, which is several 100 V in voltage, 10-100 A in current, several hundred millisecond in pulse width. A DC-DC converter and a fast switch were often applied by the traditional power supply for driving the LiDAR system. This traditional power supply had problems in efficiency and bulk, has been demonstrated that it is not proper for application on a small low-cost civilian UAV platform. In this paper, a novel power supply topology, which is based on two coupled coils, pulse generator circuit, and a fast switch, is proposed. The power supply topology has been designed and assembled. After tested, it is confirmed that the proposed power supply is able to generate pulse voltage of 100-300 V, up to 120 A pulse current, 50-200 μs pulse width, and 50 Hz maximum pulse frequency. The specification is sufficient to drive a laser diode used in LiDAR scanning system. This power supply topology gives rid of the DC-DC converter, and is light in weight, small in volume and suitable to be used on a UAV platform.