Photonics for a Better World

SPIE’s #FacesofPhotonics is a showcase across social media that connects SPIE members in the optics and photonics community around the world. Clément Fallet It serves to highlight similarities, celebrate differences, and foster a space for conversation and community to thrive. This week on #FacesofPhotonics we are sharing the story of   Clément Fallet, Project Manager at Parrot,  a high tech company specializing in drone manufacturing located in Paris .  Clément recently presented his research at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing in Orlando, and was president and treasurer of the  Ecole Polytechnique SPIE Student Chapter. He is currently an active member of the SPIE Scholarship Committee.  We hope you enjoy his interview. 1. Share your favorite outreach or volunteer story.  Meeting a Nobel laureate is something extraordinary you always remember. So, imagine meeting not one, not two, but eight of them at the same time and place! Th...

More than 20 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices are expected to be deployed within the next few years; by 2025, this number may reach as much as 1 trillion connected devices. Driven by growth in cloud computing, mobile communications, networks of data-gathering actuators and sensors, and artificial intelligence with machine learning, this trend will change how we live our lives. Already we live among connected devices in our homes. Increasingly, we will also wear them, drive them, and monitor our health via the IoT. More businesses will build, ship, and design products and manage inventory with connected devices. In our cities, transportation, communications, and security infrastructure, and services such as water distribution and energy management will employ IoT applications. Farmers will find many uses, from insuring the health of livestock to increasing crop productivity. Several conferences scheduled for SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing 2018 (15 through 19...

Hyperspectral imaging, like many other of today's technologies, is moving into numerous commercial markets after developing and maturing in the defense sector. While still having a strong presence in defense applications, the technology is now used in chemical detection, food quality assurance and inspection, vegetation monitoring, and plant phenotyping, among others. For more than 20 years, advances in spectral imaging have been on display at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing (DCS). The applications and capabilities of the technology have grown along with the conferences and exhibition at SPIE DCS. The ability to see more than what is visible to the human eye has always been one of the goals of optical engineers. With hyperspectral imaging they have been able to achieve just that. By accessing the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the sensors are able to image a specific wavelength range, or spectral band, and combine images of multiple bands into one 3D scene. Through...

Unmanned autonomous systems (UAS) are testing the limits of people’s comfort with independent capabilities of technology — yet these technologies are also enabling more productive crops, faster and safer disaster relief, and other benefits across fields of healthcare, defense, transportation, agriculture, and security. While some among the nonscientific population might still be making up their minds about self-driving cars and other unmanned autonomous systems, industry, government, and academia are moving forward to look for more ways to improve and even save lives. In the field Among recent projects, Hands Free Hectare at Harper Adams University was developed to enable every part of the farming process to be done by robots, not humans: “Automated machines growing the first arable crop remotely, without operators in the driving seats or agronomists on the ground.” Simon Blackmore , professor and head of engineering at Harper Adams, described in an interview with SPI...

Simon Blackmore talks about farming with robots for precision agriculture in an SPIE Newsroom video interview [6:58]. Ten to 15 years ago, farmers used to laugh when Simon Blackmore and his colleagues talked about deploying robotics for such chores as weeding, protecting crops from disease or pests, or selecting harvest-ready vegetables — all while helping to cut costs and limit chemical and other impacts on the soil. Now, he said in an SPIE Newsroom video interview posted last week , they’re asking questions about how robotics and other photonics-enabled technologies can help save energy and money, minimize soil damage, and improve crop yield. Blackmore, who is Head of Engineering at Harper Adams University in Shropshire, director of the UK National Centre for Precision Farming (NCPF), and project manager of FutureFarm, also shared his ideas in a new conference at SPIE Defense and Commercial Sensing in April on technologies with applications in precision agriculture . ...