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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.
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(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.