The low-altitude economy is accelerating its rise—with the domestic market scale reaching 670.25 billion yuan in 2024, projected to exceed 1.5 trillion yuan in 2025 and potentially hit 2 trillion yuan by 2030. As the core carrier, drones’ flight safety is pivotal to the large-scale industrial implementation. However, the inherent limitations of traditional obstacle avoidance technologies have long restricted the expansion of scenarios such as low-altitude logistics and urban inspection.
As a pioneer in Single-Photon Direct Time-of-Flight (SPAD dToF) technology, CoreSight has achieved large-scale application in fields like floor sweepers. Now focusing on the drone track, the company aims to break through the obstacle avoidance bottleneck through technological innovation and fortify the safety foundation of low-altitude flight.
Industry Pain Points Highlighted: Limitations of Traditional Obstacle Avoidance Solutions in Complex Scenarios
Current mainstream drone obstacle avoidance solutions each have inherent limitations, failing to adapt to the complex low-altitude flight environment. Specific drawbacks are as follows:
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Pure Visual Solutions: As the market mainstream with low material costs, small size, and low power consumption, they are highly dependent on light conditions and environmental textures.
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Infrared Sensing Solutions: Easy to operate and once widely used for downward ranging, but suffer from low precision and short detection distance.
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Radar Solutions: Boasting strong anti-interference capabilities and no light dependence, they are however large in size and high in cost. Limited to scenarios like intelligent driving, they cannot meet the demands of consumer-grade drones.
Among these, the most widely used pure visual solutions exhibit particularly prominent flaws in common complex low-altitude scenarios:
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Low-Light Environments: During the blue hour, night street lighting, etc., target recognition speed drops sharply, and small obstacles such as thin wires and twigs are difficult to detect.
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High-Reflective/Textureless Targets: They directly "fail" when facing glass curtain walls, solid-color walls, etc., falling into the awkward situation of "seeing but not perceiving."
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Total Darkness: Drones cannot fly normally, and return flights are also high-risk. This is seriously inconsistent with the core demand of "safety and efficiency" in the low-altitude economy, becoming a major bottleneck for industrial large-scale development.
VA6320 Empowers the Low-Altitude Economy: Precisely Matching Scenario-Specific Needs
When the mature VA6320 ToF sensor is applied in the drone field, it is like equipping drones with a pair of "all-weather night-vision eyes." Whether in crowded urban building gaps or rural forests and farmlands, it can accurately perceive the environment, effectively ensuring drone flight safety and aligning with the core needs of the low-altitude economy.
The core performance advantages of VA6320 fully adapt to the operational requirements of drone scenarios:
Equipped with a 1/18-inch ToF imaging solution and a 40×30-pixel backside-illuminated (BSI) SPAD array, combined with DTI technology and a Gen2 DSP depth processing module, it outputs sub-millimeter precision depth images. This enables clear capture of environmental details, perfectly meeting the core perception needs for drone obstacle avoidance.
Innovative global shutter architecture paired with an MIPI CSI-2 interface supports a maximum frame rate of 60fps, completing 1,200-point depth detection in one cycle. It rapidly captures changes in the flight environment, ensuring drones respond promptly to obstacles and avoiding the risk of delayed reactions.
Adopting an industry-leading 3D stacked structure, it integrates the sensor and logic wafer through wafer-level Cu-Cu hybrid bonding, significantly reducing chip area. This provides core support for module lightweighting, precisely matching the strict weight requirements of drones.
With a ranging distance of 25m at night and 8m in strong light, its superior sunlight resistance adapts to complex lighting scenarios.
Built-in Interference Suppression Modulator (ITS), optimized TDC, and logic modules address photon pileup issues. Combined with the Gen2 DSP’s anti-noise capabilities, it effectively resists light and electromagnetic interference, ensuring stable perception in complex low-altitude environments.
Integrated with a dynamic power management module, it maximizes power reduction while maintaining high performance. Specifically designed for low-power mobile devices, it meets the long-endurance needs of drones for extended operations, expanding applicable scenarios.
The synergy of these core performances enables VA6320 to successfully overcome numerous challenges of traditional solutions. It achieves stable detection without relying on texture features, completely eliminating the industry pain point of "blind spots." This provides a solid guarantee for the safe flight of drones in complex scenarios.
Empowering with "Core" Technology: Helping the Low-Altitude Economy Fly Steadily and Far
The launch of such a scenario-tailored core component stems from CoreSight’s original aspiration of deepening technology and empowering industries. As a Nanjing Cultivated Unicorn Enterprise and Jiangsu High-Tech Enterprise, CoreSight has always adhered to the concept of "A Window to Vision, Opened from the 'Core'." It is fully committed to the R&D and industrialization of single-photon dToF technology.
In the future, CoreSight will continue to deepen ToF imaging technology, conduct technological iterations and product innovations for more intelligent terminal scenarios such as drones, robots, and AR/VR. With higher-quality core components, it will empower the intelligent upgrading of thousands of industries, driving "Made in China" to move steadily towards higher precision, higher efficiency, and greater sustainability.
