[1] https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Passenger-Cars/... [2] https://brashtech.com/data-capture-and-fusion
[1] https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Passenger-Cars/... [2] https://brashtech.com/data-capture-and-fusion
I checked out of curiosity -- you've got at least 35 posts that directly reference Continental and their Flash LIDAR based on tech from ASC that they're going to build in volume eventually. It's a valid analysis, but why post it every time LIDAR is referenced?
Their marketing is fraudulent and their lax approach to safety is going to kill people and directly harms the overall industry. If you care about self driving cars you should be criticising Tesla at every opportunity.
Leddar ships a flash LIDAR, but it's 16x1 pixels. Useful for near obstacle detection, but not enough to create a point cloud. Quanergy seems to have problems, but they have demoed[1] ASC has a 128x128 pixel unit, expensive but good. Those are the main flash LIDAR players.
MEMS mirror scanning looked promising. It worked for video projectors. But it has problems in the automotive environment, apparently.[2]
Liquid crystal beam steering goes back to at least 2004.[3]
The mechanical scanning people have real products, but the ones that can rapidly collect enough data for a point cloud still cost too much.
So Lumotive isn't that novel. The video on the Lumotive site is a render, not a demo.[4] If they had a price, a "buy" button, and reviews, now that would be progress. The vaporware to product ratio in this industry is far too high.
Somebody needs to get this right so we can have vehicle anticollision systems that profile the ground and don't plow into stationary objects.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13/how-a-bil...
[2] https://precisionlaserscanning.com/2017/12/mems-mirrors-vs-p...
You can't use LIDARs for safety critical obstacle detection as such...
It also seems odd to state that Lumotive isn't novel. The fact that people have made SLM based phased array beam steering is hardly germane to the Lumotive being able to put together a robust, wide aperture, high speed, high resolution beam steering technology, let alone a complete lidar. There is simply a lot more to getting this stuff to work than just reading some paper from 2004 about SLM based steering in the lab.
Also, no lidar OEMs have a "buy" button. You're suggesting that this is because it's all a scam? I think it's because they don't need or want to sell to you. They are all out making partnerships with large vendors. I'll grant that some companies do appear to have vaporware products (most famously Quanergy's solid state product), but the reason there are many companies working at it is being there is a need and lots of commercial potential. The commercial potential in this case comes from the automotive industry, so there is basically zero incentive to sell at a consumer level. Not even velodyne, who definitely has real products, sells over the web. Even Ouster, who prides themselves at being the "available now" high performance lidar company, doesn't have a "buy" button. Perhaps if you email their sales guys and then send them $4k they will send you a unit, but it remains that the business model isn't sustained on individual sales.
Finally, the continental lidar you linked has pretty bad angular resolution (~1deg) and no stated range. The latter probably being because flash lidar is at a fundamental disadvantage to scanned lidar. Instead of all the photons going to one place, they go everywhere. This scales very badly with range, so they will be power (SNR) limited. The only way to overcome this would be to have correspondingly more sensitive detectors, which I do not believe is the case. Even if they gang together many small flash lidars that look at narrow FOVs, those lidars would probably have to be close to one pixel wide to compete on SNR while staying eye safe, in which case you end up losing the "scales on a chip" economics. This might be one reason why Ouster still spins a pixel wide array rather than strobing many.
Even with 1550nm light and single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs), this is clearly infeasible. Even Princeton Lightwave (now bought by Ford/Argo), arguably the fathers of modern 1550nm/SPADs flash LIDAR have moved away to a hybrid configuration for autonomous vehicles.
Ouster is interesting. But it's not a no moving parts system. It rotates. It's like Velodyne's spinners, but with more integration of the lasers and sensors onto single ICs.
Ouster probably has the best potential path to full solid state with multipointflash lidar.
but isn't it possible that the risk of waiting for sales volume to reach a certain threshold, thereby creating opportunities for other companies to bring their tech up to the same standard, outweighs the risk of selling the units below cost to capture marketshare in the short term?
you're right, any real competitor would at least be sending out dev kits if they were road ready.
i guess what im saying is that every day that continental delays is a day closer those companies get to having a product thats dev-kit ready, and thus a day closer to bleeding market share to them