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Comment by amjaeger | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the lidar on the google car made by Velodyne? I know the radio head video used Velodyne's Lidar. And the picture of the lidar that they show is a picture of the Velodyne HDL-64 Can anyone explain?

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The article didn't really make it sound like 510 built the LIDAR, just that they do the integration and software to process the data into maps. The article is also very explicit about their role in processing the data into the cool cloud visualization for the Radiohead video, not capturing it.

I think the photo captioned "510’s lidar system" and showing nothing besides than a Velodyne sensor bolted to a frame is specific enough to be misleading.

Velodyne already has their own self driving car. What google is working on is the hard bits like figuring out how to handle cyclists, shitty drivers, pedestrians, traffic lights. Those things are hard.

But someday I'd really like to see an open source version of a road capsule.

Mainly aimed taking existing cars and running them like trains on a track.

1) Stop when an obstacle is in front 2) Automatic follow the current lane, maintain a safe distance with car in-front and follow the speed limit. 3) Parse traffic lights and be able to make turns. 4) Wait for passenger to get in and out.

There's no reason why I can't take a short nap while I'm on a 100km straight road going cross country at night when there are almost no cars on the road.

I'm betting that someday in the future we're going to have lanes on road specifically for self driving buses/cars just like we have dedicated train lanes.

One of the lessons of the Grand Challenge was, put a bunch of sensors up there, even though it's expensive, and be sure you have good lidar coverage. Velodynes are one main high-end option for lidar.

Lidars can be more effective than stereo cameras (although they have tradeoffs vs. stereo in some use cases).

Lidar is just a sensor, it doesn't do the whole self-driving thing.

The LIDAR that Google uses costs $100.000, and is the most expensive part. The car itself cost (less than) half of that.

The hardware isn't the interesting part of the project. The software is what's cutting-edge, and it cost way more than $100k to make it.

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