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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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(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]