Ouster's new digital Lidar – 128 beams, ultra-wide view

I wonder how much we have to blame ITAR restrictions on >1555nm lasers for things like this not being more eye-safe on a by-wavelength basis.

I'm concerned once these become more prevalent on all cars or whatever else we stick these on. Curious if there's any studies on if it affects our eyes in anyway.

Unless those heat lamps that also produce visible light damage the eye, I don't see how 865nm lidar could do it if the power is low.

However, when there are many 865 nm lidars around, each one gets focused to a different spot in your retina, so it is not any more likely to cause damage than a single lidar. Thanks to the low power of the Ouster lidar, it is Class 1 eye-safe at any distance.

If there were a hundred high-power 1550 nm lidars all pointed at the surface of your eyeball, however, I wonder if it would be more likely to cause damage?

Also, Ouster runs a sponsorship program that gives deeply discounted or free sensors to cool projects. If you have a cool idea, shoot me an email: derek.frome at ouster dot io

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1453431-REG/lg_hf80la...

it's 1080p of resolution in lighting from two angles at 60 fps for like ~100-200 W. if you had some good cameras and some clever and fast software you could use this thing to illuminate anything you need to know about -- a high frequency light probe. i don't think you need coherent light at all or phase control, you'd just like timing control so you can strobe between left and right lights and use the variation to better characterize objects.

whole system seems doable in budgets of ~$8k hardware (total guess...)

Tesla cars have radar which can see through any weather condition and detect transparent surfaces, invisible to LIDAR.

Just because LIDAR doesn't make sense for the Model 3 today, doesn't mean it should be entirely discounted.

Lots of things could fix this, less beam divergence, custom signals processing on multiple returns. But out of the box, it’s this statement does not hold true.

-4f (-20c) is cold, the cabin of the car is heated to well above that. Just heat the lidar as well.

The bigger issue is hot weather; electronics and lasers work well (often more efficiently) at cold temps, and the electrical power running through them self-heats the components. The problem arises when the environment is already hot, and the components still self-heat. This is a particularly large problem for LiDAR, where lasers are very sensitive to temperature and typically use some sort of thermoelectric controller to keep the laser itself at a precise constant temperature. But these thermoelectric devices are inefficient at cooling and lose control (go into thermal runaway) when things get too hot. Automotive component thermal specs (AEC-Q100) require operation (and start-up) at -40C up to anywhere from 70-150C depending on grade. Ouster's -10/-20C to 50C range actually relies on an external base heatsink being used, which they never picture and makes the sensor significantly heavier and larger. These sensors are a far cry from being ready for automotive use.

Working on time-of-flight Stereo camera in my spare time. Few centimeter error is very normal. It was shocking at the beginning, but I now understand why bin picking is still hard task.

https://www.boschtools.com/us/en/boschtools-ocs/laser-measur...

They have 1-2mm accuracy and quite good precision, particularly if your environment is stable (temperature, movement, lighting). These modules use an interferometry approach rather than time of flight to achieve their accuracy.

Several of them have a Bluetooth interface which you could reverse-engineer. The work then would be creating a turret to rotate the unit around a known centerpoint and take a bunch of samples. It'd be slow, but it works.

There are also a bunch of modules available on Alibaba for a few tens of dollars that have serial interfaces and seem to have similar performance - they often have 10s of Hz sample rates, so you could speed up scanning quite a lot. They exhibit similar accuracy to the boxed units I've bought, but require you to be comfortable with things like SPI and soldering.

Angular accuracy 18” Range accuracy 1.0 mm + 10 ppm 3D point accuracy 1.9 mm @ 10 m 2.9 mm @ 20 m 5.3 mm @ 40 m

(disclaimer: I work for Leica)

Lidar sensors can interfere with each other, and a certain industry-standard company is famous for having terrible problems with this issue, but there are engineering solutions to this problem. FMCW is a popular choice, and gives the benefit of providing instantaneous velocity readings. Of course, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, this means you also get worse distance estimation. There are other ways to engineer around the interference problem as well.

https://www.laserfocusworld.com/home/article/16556322/lasers...

There's a good explanation in the post about what we mean by digital lidar, but the tl;dr version is we use silicon CMOS chips for lasers and detectors vs analog components like side emitting lasers and APDs used by legacy lidar providers.

Solid state is a bit of a buzzword, and most "solid state" lidar sensors actually have small, delicate moving parts inside. Solid state sensors are aimed primarily at consumer vehicles, which are still many years away.

The benefit is (at least in theory) easier integration into the vehicle fascia and (again, in theory) higher reliability vs legacy spinning lidar, which are quite unreliable in the real world.

Ouster's digital lidar sensors are much more reliable than the legacy analog spinning lidar sensors, and much more compact - and therefore easier to integrate.

We make a point of this because legacy spinning lidar is unreliable. But it's unreliable because of the analog design, not because spinning is inherently unreliable.