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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @11:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the lighting-the-way dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday January 02 2018, @07:43PM (2 children)

    by Dr Spin (5239) on Tuesday January 02 2018, @07:43PM (#616847)

    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.

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  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:19PM (1 child)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:19PM (#616897) Homepage

    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

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday January 03 2018, @06:00PM (#617257) Homepage
      My record deck's 30 years old and still going strong.
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