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Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar

#41

Post by threeseed »

greglindahl wrote: post #16
asteli wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I hadn't seen an Animats comment here, I would have copy pasted it from your history just to beat you to it. 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?

He also posts a negative comment about Tesla in every Tesla thread -- I guess this is his hobby or something.

Tesla justly deserves all of the negative criticism they get.

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.

Re: Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar

#42

Post by threeseed »

fnord77 wrote: post #35

Please correct me if I am wrong - I am under the impression that camera-based systems were getting good enough to make lidar moot, at least for self-driving car applications.

No self driving program is relying entirely on camera based systems otherwise they would struggle at night. Tesla for example is augmenting it with radar.

I am not an expert but I wouldn't trust a camera only solution purely on the fact you could never keep it completely clean and therefore you could have the car mistaking dust for an object.

Re: Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar

#44

Post by closeparen »

nardi wrote: post #15
gumby wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IV was explicitly founded as a patent troll. I find their processes so nefarious that I avoid talking to their employees when I run into them at conferences.

I don’t know anything about IV or their business practices, but it sounds like in this case they are funding research in order to patent useful inventions that they could then presumably license to manufacturers. Doesn’t sound like patent trolling.

Patent trolls are the secondary market for IP; whether they fund it pre or post hoc is not that important.

Re: Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar

#45

Post by Robotbeat »

threeseed wrote: post #42
fnord77 wrote: post #35

Please correct me if I am wrong - I am under the impression that camera-based systems were getting good enough to make lidar moot, at least for self-driving car applications.

No self driving program is relying entirely on camera based systems otherwise they would struggle at night. Tesla for example is augmenting it with radar. I am not an expert but I wouldn't trust a camera only solution purely on the fact you could never keep it completely clean and therefore you could have the car mistaking dust for an object.

The latter is a problem with LIDAR as well. In any system, you're going to need sensor fusion to get a robust result.

Re: Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar

#46

Post by Animats »

deepnotderp wrote: post #33
Animats wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

128x128 is as far as ASC got. There's a tradeoff between range and beam width for flash LIDAR. The idea is to get the price down, so you can have multiple wide-angle short range ones around the perimeter of the vehicle, and a narrow beam long range one pointed ahead.

The brutal thing about flash is that it doesn't matter how many pixels you collect, it's still going to spread out over the whole thing. Multipoint flash like Ouster is better in this respect.

The output side can be spread out to allow for higher laser power. The safety issue is how much energy goes through a hole about 0.25" in diameter, the size of the human eye, at the closest you can get to the emitter. If you spread out the outgoing beam, this is less of a problem.

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.

Re: Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar

#47

Post by amluto »

runin2k1 wrote: post #31
tzs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to settle it: > The retina does not respond to the 905-nm infrared light used in current car lidars, so we can’t see it. But the eye transmits 905 nm to the retina, so it’s subject to the same restrictions as visible light. In fact, it’s even more hazardous because the eye cannot automatically turn away from a bright source that the retina can’t sense. The eye is opaque to 1550 nm light, and so even if you…

Which isn't to say that 1550 nm light is safer -- the mode of destruction is just different, e.g. corneal damage leading to cataracts or surface burns rather than retinal damage.

As I understand it, it’s largely a focusing issue. Close to the visible range, a distant point source gets focused to a point on the retina. At 1550nm, the energy is deposited uniformly on the cornea unless the laser is focused to a tiny spot on the cornea.

edit: I don’t know to what extent this is relevant, but humans can regenerate the corneal epithelium. Think about all the sand you’ve gotten in your eye as a kid, and the fact that it probably didn’t accumulate enough damage to blind you.

Re: Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar

#48

Post by sk0g »

stcredzero wrote: post #14
pinewurst wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The former. It's only the IEEE so they can't be expected to spell or fact check.

In the 90's, engineers were more likely to write code without any indenting. That used to be a thing. Is it still a thing?

If these are the same engineers that have moved on to writing Python because you can get fairly close to math-y notation, well... Let's just say it can't be a thing.

Re: Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar

#49

Post by deepnotderp »

Animats wrote: post #46
deepnotderp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The brutal thing about flash is that it doesn't matter how many pixels you collect, it's still going to spread out over the whole thing. Multipoint flash like Ouster is better in this respect.

The output side can be spread out to allow for higher laser power. The safety issue is how much energy goes through a hole about 0.25" in diameter, the size of the human eye, at the closest you can get to the emitter. If you spread out the outgoing beam, this is less of a problem. 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…

Still not eye safe enough, but also getting a 36 million times laser isn't cheap :)

Ouster probably has the best potential path to full solid state with multipointflash lidar.

Re: Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar

#50

Post by jakobegger »

Robotbeat wrote: post #45
threeseed wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No self driving program is relying entirely on camera based systems otherwise they would struggle at night. Tesla for example is augmenting it with radar. I am not an expert but I wouldn't trust a camera only solution purely on the fact you could never keep it completely clean and therefore you could have the car mistaking dust for an object.

The latter is a problem with LIDAR as well. In any system, you're going to need sensor fusion to get a robust result.

With LIDAR you would at least know that there's missing data, and the system could react accordingly (eg. sound an alert or stop when the road is no longer detected)

The problem with camera based systems is that they don't know that they are missing data, and the system just thinks the path is clear...

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