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On November 3, 2007, six vehicles made history by successfully navigating a simulated urban environment—and complying with California traffic laws—without a driver behind the wheel. Five of the six were sporting a revolutionary new type of lidar sensor that had recently been introduced by an audio equipment maker called Velodyne.
A decade later, Velodyne's lidar continues to be a crucial technology for self-driving cars. Lidar costs are coming down but are still fairly expensive. Velodyne and a swarm of startups are trying to change that.
Some experts believe the key to building lidar that costs hundreds of dollars instead of thousands is to abandon Velodyne's mechanical design—where a laser physically spins around 360 degrees, several times per second—in favor of a solid-state design that has few if any moving parts. That could make the units simpler, cheaper, and much easier to mass-produce.
Nobody knows how long it will take to build cost-effective automotive-grade lidar. But all of the experts we talked to were optimistic. They pointed to the many previous generations of technology—from handheld calculators to antilock brakes—that became radically cheaper as they were manufactured at scale. Lidar appears to be on a similar trajectory, suggesting that in the long run, lidar costs won't be a barrier to mainstream adoption of self-driving cars.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/driving-around-without-a-driver-lidar-technology-explained/
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:24PM (6 children)
What is it 1936 all over again? Was this invented by J L Baird?
I would have thought that piezo based mechanisms would be the obvious way,
and an array of leds like an OKI printer, paired with an array of CCD devices the best approach.
Publicly disclosing both ideas as obvious to anyone with any relevant skills at all to nullify any patents
applied for.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:42PM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday January 02 2018, @07:43PM (2 children)
moving laser beams is as cheap as chips.
I am not sure I would agree. Chips (as in volume produced silicon) is about as cheap as you can get. Moving parts
are not an attractive feature if you are interested in reliability, and loss of input from you lidar could lead to
very costly law suits.
When it comes to robustness, spinning lasers almost certainly have none of it. It may have escaped your notice,
but where I live, cars go over bumps. A lot.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:19PM (1 child)
Anybody know is familiar with working on gadgets knows that the "moving" part of "moving parts is the primary cause of failure in sensory gadgets, and especially since the LIDAR head likely uses a slipring in its comparatively fast rate of rotation. If I were to drive a self-driving car I would pick a model with more sensor redundancy and less moving parts.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday January 03 2018, @06:00PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:50PM
Do you seriously think that would stop Sony from patenting it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:26PM
We've already been around this topic before, as AC, I submitted this article https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/07/28/0131243 [soylentnews.org] back in July 2017. The Valeo unit noted below does not use a rotating mirror --
There have been a few other SN articles as well.