Liu Xiaoyuan

PhD student, Department of Electrical Engineering
Top Ten Academic Youth Award for Metamaterial Postgraduate

“To our knowledge, this is the first meta-lens device operated by a drone.”

Traditional optical imaging systems usually consist of a group of lenses to correct spherical or chromatic aberration, which tend to be bulky. When using more than one camera, there will be a set of complex data transformations to calibrate the whole imaging system. Determined to tackle this problem, Liu Xiaoyuan, a PhD student from the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) embarked on a journey that would lead her to beat over 300 candidates and win the Top Ten Academic Youth Award for Metamaterial Postgraduate.

Supervised by Professor Tsai Din-Ping and Professor Chen Mu-Ku from EE, she successfully developed a series of novel meta-devices that provides lighter and more flexible solutions for aerial, land, and underwater application scenarios. She also reported her findings on meta-lens for aerial, land, and underwater imaging at the 2nd China Metamaterials Conference held in May 2023.

Meta-lenses are advanced optical devices composed of artificial nano-antenna arrays that offer various potential usages for new demands. They are lightweight, customisable and more flexible to match various scientific and technical application scenarios than the traditional optical lens, especially in space-constrained and fragile environments, such as drones, autonomous driving, and micro-submarines.

For more stories about our Heroes, please click here.