German car makes (Mercedes, Audi, BMW,...) think they can create a driverless car without the need for expensive Lidar, see for example http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self...
I'm excited for this. Car ownership and operation could be an interesting historical note 200 years from now. Family scheduling would become much more flexible and children incapable of operating a vehicle will be empowered to travel long distances.
The big big thing I see about driverless cars is:
a) You can use it on-demand, even more easily than Zipcars. No need to physically be located near a lot, I can "hail" a driverless car and have it waiting for me when I need it. Smart routing and allocation can ensure that capacity is used smartly - it could drop somebody off while picking me up.
b) People who can't or won't drive can benefit from this. From young children to the elderly, transportation becomes much much easier. Have to take your kid to an appointment in the middle of the day? A driverless car can pick them up from school and bring them directly to the appointment and you can meet them there. You go to the appointment together, then driverless cars can take each of you back to your daily work, saving time all-around.
Yes - it's useful to have a car to keep stuff in. I can imagine you could keep one "on call" for a day out, and you can meet the car (at whatever exit is closest to you!) throughout the day to get supplies or drop things off.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic about what driverless cars can give us. Realistically I think hands-off driverless cars are within the next few years, but FUD and lawsuits will prevent more radical forward progress. It's certainly not unimaginable that it will take an entire generation of people to die off before truly autonomous cars are common and accepted.
So, combine driverless cars with depots with loading/unloading robots, then you can leave stuff in your driverless car, and have access to it with the next driverless pickup.
If your point is that lidar won't be cheap enough even at economies of scale to make a mass market device, then just answer OPs question directly. Your comment is just a restatement in a less intuitive way.
Why is Lidar so expensive? My vacuum cleaner has Lidar. Clearly not of the same grade as that on the Google car, but what is it that makes their unit cost tends of thousands of dollars and is this likely to fall dramatically at scale?
The lidar in your vacuum (presumably a neato-XV series; if so, you have fine taste sir/madam) is no more than a spinning laser range finder. These work by offsetting a laser from a linear image sensor (imagine a camera with a crazy wide aspect ratio, maybe 256x6 resolution) and calculating distance by simple trigonometry or a pre-calibrated look-up table. These are called spinning parallax lidar. Their output is two dimensional in polar coordinates (angle, distance).
More expensive lidar systems use carrier wave phase measurements (modulate the laser to a known signal, look for its reflection and calculate phase difference), direct time of flight measurements (like narrow beam sonic range finding, but with light, requires very expensive timing circuitry), doppler shift, and/or various structured light transformation/interference effects. Some units only use one of these techniques, some use a combination of these techniques. Most of these units operate using a number of lasers simultaneously to spit out 3 dimensional data, either as planar depth maps, or as 3D polar coordinates (angle-x, angle-y, radius). Either way, all of these are expensive because they require very fast and very precise complex analog circuitry, tight controls on noise sources (RF interference, temperature dependence, very good power isolation), tight controls on spurious emissions (GHz oscillators), careful calibration, and most importantly, very complicated software.
To me, time of flight is the most interesting, but the least practical/likely to be made inexpensive. For a DIY example of the kind of timing circuitry involved, check out [1].
That said, there's room to make it cheaper. One such way may be to use a structured light transformation technique similar to Kinect, but speed up the camera a bit and modulate the output to a known signal (gives better interference rejection).
The interesting takeaway that I had from the visit was that the team working on this car believes that even partially autonomous cars are a technology that will come into the main stream only several decades into the future.
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/video/fahrerloses-auto-leonie-kreuzt-d...
Sorry, the link is to a video in German. I'm sure that if you search for Braunschweig "Leonie" you may find a source in English.
There are some solutions to this problem (using a Markov Random field or some assumptions about the surface), but I'm not sure how reliable they are.
ed. I guess that's the trillion dollar question...
Those are actually the same issues one encounters when develops computer stereo :) The modern cameras got to the retina resolution and computer power today is able to do stereo match on those resolutions - this is why we started to get meaningful results. The computer stereo will surpass human's because cameras can have higher resolution, higher sensitivity and they can see in different wavelengths in addition to visual. Plus you can "paint" the objects ahead of you with IR for example, so the stereo match would be even easier.
Be honest. Do you think that most of the people that are browsing over and reading these comments are knowledgeable enough in your niche field to know all those acronyms?
Probably not.
RF is probably radio frequency
INS is probably inertial navigation system - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system
Yes, I should have spelled out the first two. The third I do expect most people here to know, given the context of the thread.
> Do you think that most of the people that are browsing over and reading these comments are knowledgeable enough in your niche field to know all those acronyms?
RF and sensors may be a portion of electrical engineering that is rarely discussed here, but it is hardly "niche".
I made a quick post where I should have made a more detailed one. Mea culpa.