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posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 14 2020, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the illuminating-information dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 14 2020, @07:14PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 14 2020, @07:14PM (#958242) Journal

    But is Lidar better?

    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.

    Or is stereoscopic vision really the way forward

    In the long term, I believe so.

    we just don't have the processing power in our computers yet to handle it?

    Have we tried very hard? Or is Lidar too appealing and addictive like a narcotic?

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 14 2020, @07:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 14 2020, @07:21PM (#958245)

    >> 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.