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Nikon will help build Velodyne's lidar sensors for future self-driving cars
With the notable exception of one automaker, most companies are generally in agreement that lidar is a vital component of the hardware necessary to enable some degree of vehicle autonomy. However, with all that demand out there, any company that wants its product all over the industry will need to build at scale. To achieve that scale, one lidar manufacturer is reaching out to a company with a lot of lens experience.
Velodyne announced on Thursday that it has signed an agreement with Nikon, in which the company most famous for its cameras will manufacture lidar sensors for Velodyne. Nikon plans to start mass production of Velodyne's lidar in the second half of 2019.
"Mass production of our high-performance lidar sensors is key to advancing Velodyne's immediate plans to expand sales in North America, Europe, and Asia," said Marta Hall, president of Velodyne Lidar, in a statement. "It is our goal to produce lidar in the millions of units with manufacturing partners such as Nikon. Working with Nikon, an expert in precision manufacturing, is a major step toward lowering the cost of our lidar products."
Nikon has already invested $25 million in Velodyne's business, so this manufacturing announcement represents the first big step in their partnership. Velodyne didn't specify how else the two companies plan to join forces, saying only that the pair "will continue to investigate further areas of a wide-ranging and multifaceted business alliance." Velodyne did say, though, that it wants its lidar to be used beyond automotive applications, including agriculture, mapping and security.
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Lots of companies are working to develop self-driving cars. And almost all of them use lidar, a type of sensor that uses lasers to build a three-dimensional map of the world around the car. But Tesla CEO Elon Musk argues that these companies are making a big mistake. "They're all going to dump lidar," Elon Musk said at an April event showcasing Tesla's self-driving technology. "Anyone relying on lidar is doomed."
"Lidar is really a shortcut," added Tesla AI guru Andrej Karpathy. "It sidesteps the fundamental problems of visual recognition that is necessary for autonomy. It gives a false sense of progress, and is ultimately a crutch."
In recent weeks I asked a number of experts about these claims. And I encountered a lot of skepticism. "In a sense all of these sensors are crutches," argued Greg McGuire, a researcher at MCity, the University of Michigan's testing ground for autonomous vehicles. "That's what we build, as engineers, as a society—we build crutches."
Self-driving cars are going to need to be extremely safe and reliable to be accepted by society, McGuire said. And a key principle for high reliability is redundancy. Any single sensor will fail eventually. Using several different types of sensors makes it less likely that a single sensor's failure will lead to disaster.
"Once you get out into the real world, and get beyond ideal conditions, there's so much variability," argues industry analyst (and former automotive engineer) Sam Abuelsamid. "It's theoretically possible that you can do it with cameras alone, but to really have the confidence that the system is seeing what it thinks it's seeing, it's better to have other orthogonal sensing modes"—sensing modes like lidar.
Previously: Robo-Taxis and 'the Best Chip in the World'
Related: Affordable LIDAR Chips for Self-Driving Vehicles
Why Experts Believe Cheaper, Better Lidar is Right Around the Corner
Stanford Researchers Develop Non-Line-of-Sight LIDAR Imaging Procedure
Self Driving Cars May Get a New (non LiDAR) Way to See
Nikon Will Help Build Velodyne's Lidar Sensors for Future Self-Driving Cars
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
Nikon Will Help Build Velodyne's Lidar Sensors for Future Self-Driving Cars
Contrary To Musk's Claims, Lidar Has Some Advantages In Self Driving Technology
Artificial Eyes: How Robots Will See In The Future
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 29 2019, @11:11PM (3 children)
Who buys cameras anymore? Only so many luddites without cellphones.
(Score: 4, Touché) by takyon on Monday April 29 2019, @11:25PM
Tesla buys cameras because LIDAR bad.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 29 2019, @11:51PM
An executive from Rogers once said to me: you have the luxury not to have a cellphone, don't trade it for less than 300k/yr. I have followed that advice, I plateaued at 90k but I have job security and a gold plated pention plan (paid by those indebted students and taxes, mouhahaha) and work 35hr/wk. Being a luddite is great!!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @12:48AM
1. Article says Nikon are going to make LIDAR equipment for this project/client.
2. Note that optical systems have outperformed LIDAR and don't have side-effects like ruining other equipment.
3. Obviously you are a luddite, happy with the crappy images from your mega-spy-phone. Real cameras are a different beast.
4. Companies like Nikon and Canon are diversifying as (real) camera sales drop sharply. The vast majority are #3 people...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @01:32AM
I thought SN didn't do ads.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Shire on Tuesday April 30 2019, @03:08AM (3 children)
“Lidar is a fool’s errand,” Elon Musk said.
“Anyone relying on lidar is doomed. Doomed! They are expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it’s ridiculous, you’ll see.”
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday April 30 2019, @04:25PM (2 children)
What's missing — so far — are inexpensive, high resolution, deep-IR cameras.
In order to see some road hazards in time to react to them, particularly live ones with decent camouflage adaptation, a normal-light camera won't do. A high-IR camera doesn't do the same job, requiring an illuminator, whereas a low-IR camera actually detects living (warmish) things.
There are some low-res low-IR consumer cameras [amazon.com] that are in the sorta-affordable range now, but they're really not up to the task at hand in a vehicle that requires information about what's ahead. The linked example is only about 220x160. And who knows how good it would be across the environmental ranges a vehicle sees.
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(Score: 2) by The Shire on Tuesday April 30 2019, @05:00PM (1 child)
I think the problem with that is that IR does poorly in weather - rain, fog, snow. If you illuminate the area with IR you end up with a whiteout condition on your camera. Radar does a much better job in such conditions.
That being said, I would be curious to see how any self driving system operates in blizzard conditions.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday April 30 2019, @07:50PM
That's how a high IR camera system works; illuminates in high IR, detects the reflections of same. I'm not talking about that.
Low IR does not require an illuminator, and so does not create a brightly illuminated haze upon intervening particulates.
Low IR in this context is radiant energy that comes from a warm body, essentially it is a measure of its warmth; a low IR camera detects this and presents an image of same.
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