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Velodyne Will Sell a Lidar for $100
Velodyne claims to have broken the US $100 barrier for automotive lidar with its tiny Velabit, which it unveiled at CES earlier this month.
"Claims" is the mot juste because this nice, round dollar amount is an estimate based on the mass-manufacturing maturity of a product that has yet to ship. Such a factoid would hardly be worth mentioning had it come from some of the several-score odd lidar startups that haven't shipped anything at all. But Velodyne created this industry back during DARPA-funded competitions, and has been the market leader ever since.
"The projection is $100 at volume; we'll start sampling customers in the next few months," Anand Gopalan, the company's chief technology officer, tells IEEE Spectrum.
The company says in a release that the Velabit "delivers the same technology and performance found on Velodyne's full suite of state-of-the-art sensors." Given the device's small size, that must mean the solid-state version of the technology. That is, the non-rotating kind.
Related: Why Experts Believe Cheaper, Better Lidar is Right Around the Corner
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Contrary To Musk's Claims, Lidar Has Some Advantages In Self Driving Technology
Artificial Eyes: How Robots Will See In The Future
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday January 27 2020, @10:32PM (13 children)
Hardware's good as an intrusion detector too I guess. As for self driving vehicles, lol why a bot would want one.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27 2020, @10:47PM (2 children)
Can the 100mW laser be replaced with a 2PW laser?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday January 27 2020, @11:00PM (1 child)
OK be honest, it's not against intruders, it's to make your mother in law disappear quietly.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday January 28 2020, @12:14AM
"quiet" is not a term I think I would associate with hitting something with a 20PW laser.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday January 27 2020, @11:01PM (7 children)
If you need some lidar to upgrade yourself or for some other robotic project, Adafruit have them. The girl knows good what she's doing.
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-vl53l0x-micro-lidar-distance-sensor-breakout/overview [adafruit.com]
https://learn.adafruit.com/garmin-lidar-lite-range-finder [adafruit.com]
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4058 [adafruit.com]
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2) by optotronic on Tuesday January 28 2020, @02:40AM (6 children)
As Immerman points out below, the Adafruit devices are only rangefinders. The Velodyne Velabit claims 60 degree field of view:
One of their older, non-solid-state devices claims "360° Horizontal FOV":
https://velodynelidar.com/products/hdl-64e/ [velodynelidar.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday January 28 2020, @02:58AM (2 children)
Adding vibration to 1D sensor to make 2D angle of it is easy to trivial. Easier than full 360° rotation. A hobbyist can pull that.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 28 2020, @01:40PM
The point of this sensor is that you don't NEED to add that rotation in.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday January 28 2020, @05:37PM
Sure, and you could build a photograph using a single photoreceptor in the same way basic way. But the image quality is going to be a lot better with a purpose-built camera. Even if the camera actually uses the exact same technique under the hood, you've got all that engineering and calibration work already completed by someone who can afford to spend much more time and effort on it, since they can spread the cost across thousands (millions?) of customers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 28 2020, @03:54AM (2 children)
60 deg horizontal means you need 6 of them to cover all sides. So it's not really $100 per car...it's $600 per car. And if something hits & breaks your Lidar sensors, you can bet that the replacement cost will be something like an order of magnitude more expensive...at the dealer.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday January 28 2020, @05:46PM (1 child)
Yep. Because you need a full 360 simultaneous view in order to drive - that's why the DMV requires that you get at least two additional eyes installed around your skull before they will let you get a driver's license.
If LIDAR is your *only* sensor, and you don't want some sort of mechanical "neck" to let the sensors look around, then yeah, you probably want a full 360 view. But there's also s a whole lot of value to be had with accurate range-finder imaging along your intended direction of travel though, with cheaper but more error-prone sensors providing "peripheral vision"
Then again, at $100 per 60*FOV, full 360 LIDAR coverage might be an attractive option.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @06:33PM
> at least two additional eyes installed around your skull before they will let you get a driver's license.
Didn't the driver's ed instructor keep telling you to watch your mirrors as part of situational awareness and also track what is headed toward the blind spots? In my case the instructor suggested that we make overt head moves toward the mirrors, makes it obvious to the inspector during the driving *test* that you are checking the mirrors.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday January 28 2020, @12:25AM (1 child)
Unless I misunderstand the technology badly, Lidar imaging is a very different beast than a single Lidar rangefinder, such as that Adafruit link is for. (functionally at least, implementation details can vary)
Basically, a lidar rangefinder is a 1D sensor, it tells you how far away what it's looking at is. Think of it as a single greyscale point whose brightness tells you the nearness of what it's looking at.
A lidar vision system on the other hand is a 3D sensor - it generates a 2D greyscale image of the environment, where the brightness of each pixel tells you how far away that pixel is. A picture of the world, with actual, measured distances from which you can easily build a 3D model of the world you're looking at. (rather than calculated based on applying imperfect stereo image analysis to chaotic real-world images.)
Pretty useful for any sort of automated navigation system.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Tuesday January 28 2020, @03:59PM
This is a good example of what spinning lidar will produce https://i0.wp.com/geoawesomeness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Drones_LiDAR_Cartographic_Modelling_1.png [wp.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Tuesday January 28 2020, @01:18AM (7 children)
Anyone think a spinning bunch of expensive electronics mounted on the roof of your car is good for long term reliability? I've got an '05 car, about 2 months ago a bunch of things quit working. The one thing they all have in common? A $700 computer (forgot the official name, but it's by the right foot of my passenger. BCS - Body Control System sounds about right) that controls all of them. Sunroof, steering wheel radio controls, remote door locks. All failed at the same time.
Looks like it's easy enough to replace, and the junkyards have the thing for $100.
But
If you want to introduce your key fob to your car you need an expensive thing who's price dwarfs what it would cost me to take the car to the dealer and have them fix it.
So much for the shade tree mechanic, or the teenager with their first car. When modern cars break you're gonna need very expensive tools just to see what broke, and other expensive tools to mind meld your car with you.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 28 2020, @01:40AM (6 children)
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday January 28 2020, @05:39AM (3 children)
Small size doesn't prevent rotation. I mean, electrons have spin*, right?
*) Yes, I know, it's not that type of spin. Humour me, I'm spinning a (bad) joke here, mkay?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday January 28 2020, @05:51PM (2 children)
Actually, there are some theoreticians that think that quarticle "spin" might truly be a rotational property...
Offhand I can't think of any experiments that've made a particularly strong case either way. But then I probably wouldn't have heard of them.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday January 29 2020, @12:16AM (1 child)
Interesting. That made me google and led me down a rabbit hole at https://www.researchgate.net/post/Does_spin_imply_physical_rotation [researchgate.net] including the "the electron is a charged photon" theory.
I wish I had the brains/passion for physics - there is so much left to discover and understand!
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 29 2020, @04:53PM
Yeah, quantum physics is F'ing weird - compounded by the fact that we seem to have hit a brick wall on developing any sort of fundamental understanding. Superstring, mbane, etc,etc,etc... they all try, but after decades we still haven't come up with a single experiment that's provided any evidence to support any of them.
Personally, I'm glad to see Pilot Wave theory gaining momentum. Whether it's "right" or not, it comes at the problem from a completely different direction, which might generate interesting results that would give us further clues as to what's really going on. It completely eliminates the randomness of wave-function collapse and all the interesting doors that opens up, returning to a purely deterministic universe. With hidden non-local variables, granted, but with enough work we might come up with ways to "unhide" those.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 28 2020, @05:42AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by epitaxial on Tuesday January 28 2020, @04:03PM
I've taken apart a broken 16 laser Velodyne puck and they do indeed spin electronics along with the mirrors. The insides are pretty complex mechanically and electrically.