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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: 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.