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The 2020 Consumer Electronics Show was absolutely crawling with companies hawking lidar. Short for light radar (yes, really), this powerful type of sensor generates a three-dimensional pointcloud of its surroundings. Experts and industry insiders not named Elon Musk see it as a key technology for self-driving cars. There are dozens of companies developing lidar technology, and each insists that its sensor is a cut above the rest.
But while every lidar is above-average in the halls of CES, things are starting to look different in the real world. At least one segment of the market—custom robots for warehouses, mines, and other industrial sites—is starting to buy lidar sensors in significant volume. Another segment—low-end lidars used in car driver-assistance systems—is poised to become a big market in the next couple of years.
For this piece I asked both lidar company officials and independent experts to help me understand the state of the lidar market. They told me that Velodyne—the company that invented modern three-dimensional lidar more than a decade ago—continues to dominate the industry.
But Velodyne is facing growing competition from newer firms. One company in particular—Ouster—has begun shipping aggressively priced alternatives to Velodyne's flagship products. While these products might not quite match Velodyne's performance, they're good enough and cheap enough to pose a serious threat to Velodyne's dominance.
The big battles in the lidar market are still in the future. A lot of lidar sales so far have come outside of the automotive industry, but experts expect carmakers to be the biggest customers for lidar. In the next few years, we're going to see a number of carmakers make their first bulk lidar purchases—buying thousands of low-cost lidar sensors to improve their advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). A number of lidar companies are positioning themselves to win these deals, and some are pairing up with traditional "tier 1" automotive suppliers to improve their odds.
The industry's biggest prize may be supplying more powerful lidar sensors for use in fully self-driving vehicles. Many companies are angling to serve this market, but those sales are still quite a way off because fully self-driving technology isn't yet ready for prime time.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mobydisk on Friday February 14 2020, @05:22PM (3 children)
It is interesting that the only most popular device that can drive a car, a Human, uses a combination of stereoscopic vision, mirrors, hearing, and feeling to drive. Yet most of the devices on the market use Lidar. Since humans also created the system of roads, cars, and laws; we must conclude that Lidar is not required to successfully drive a car.
But is Lidar better? If humans had been born with Lidar, what differences would there be in the system? Is Lidar simply superior in every way, even with no changes to the roads? Or will it only be better if there is some change to the system? This is similar to how humans build mostly wheeled devices, yet no animal has wheels. Our wheeled robots are mostly no good unless we make roads for them. Will there be a future Lidar-based road system that humans are not equipped to drive on, where the design of the vehicles and roads is completely different? Or is stereoscopic vision really the way forward, we just don't have the processing power in our computers yet to handle it?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 14 2020, @07:14PM (1 child)
Lidar is better at being a shortcut to self driving cars. It is more difficult to develop self driving systems that perceive the driving environment using sensors similar to what human drivers are equipped with.
In the long term, I believe so.
Have we tried very hard? Or is Lidar too appealing and addictive like a narcotic?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 14 2020, @07:21PM
>> we just don't have the processing power in our computers yet to handle it?
Add to that the central focus acuity of the constantly moving (saccade) eyes and the local processing in the retina -- still much better (I believe) than affordable cameras for the driving task.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 15 2020, @01:15AM
As you and others say I think Lidar should be part of the solution. I think the problems need to be tackled from multiple angles. The use of Radar, Lidar, perhaps the car should have various microphones in it to search for audio cues as well, cars should also communicate with each other when possible via Wifi or whatever, the car should have sensors to detect if it hit a road bump or if it possibly hit something or if something hit it and to judge the smoothness and steepness of the road to adjust its driving style accordingly. Both GPS and Terrain mapping should be used. It should also read signs but perhaps they can also start adding QR or barcodes to signs to make it easier for the car to read as well? People should stop looking at it as a silver bullet and say "this one thing is the best solution" and should look for multiple solutions to work together.