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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

#51

Post by spacenick88 »

jakobegger wrote: post #50
Robotbeat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Why shouldn't a camera based system be able to do that. Dirt for example won't easily match up in a stereo vision system and even then dirt on a lense has a pretty specific look

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

#52

Post by spacenick88 »

ndiscussion wrote: post #36
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.

Assuming this comment is in good faith - I have so far only seen Tesla make that claim. And they are also the only ones trying to do self driving without LIDAR. Disclaimer: If I was a betting man, I'd short the hell out of TSLA.

They're definitely not the only ones, saw a presentation on a University team working on this just yesterday. After all, vision is the only system for which we know that it can be used to drive a vehicle as that's what we have been using all along. Also Tesla's do also have radar to detect the most important obstacles in front.

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

#53

Post by 01100011 »

tzs wrote: post #30
bryant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a 2017 ieee spectrum piece discussing a competitor's (Luminar) use of 1550nm light for reasons involving eye safety: https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel... I'm still reading it, so I can't tl;dr it quite yet, but the answer in theory should be in here.

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…

Does that apply to all animals or just humans?

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

#54

Post by 01100011 »

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.

If only they made cameras which worked at night...

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

#55

Post by tomp »

closeparen wrote: post #44
nardi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh?! Your description basically accuses many universities and VCs for being patent trolls, as they develop / fund and then licence technology, but don’t productivise it...

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

#56

Post by jacobush »

01100011 wrote: post #53
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…

Does that apply to all animals or just humans?

IIRC it's the water which is opaque?

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

#58

Post by wbl »

deepnotderp wrote: post #19
Animats wrote: post #6

Continental, the big European auto parts company, has a practical solid state LIDAR.[1] It's the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR technology, which works well but cost too much when ASC was making it by hand in Santa Barbara, CA. What they don't have is a car company ready to buy enough units to make volume production worthwhile. In the meantime, they're selling a few units to commercial drone operators.[2] […

No they don't. Flash LIDAR suffers from too little range, if you have an angular resolution for the LIDAR of say 0.01 degrees, you're looking at 36 million points! This means that you need 36 million times as much energy to match the same SNR as normal LIDAR. Even with 1550nm light and single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs), this is clearly infeasible. Even Princeton Lightwave (now bought by Ford/Argo), arguably the…

You can make a SPAD array? I've had some ideas that need that. Say more?

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

#59

Post by mikhailfranco »

tzs wrote: post #21

> The device can thus see far without having to turn up the brightness. That’s important because the sensor works at 905 nanometers, an eye-sensitive wavelength the company chose because it works with silicon. You need exotic compound semiconductors to make and detect laser light at 1550 nm, a wavelength that’s easier on the eyes 905 nm is infrared, outside the visible range for humans. If someone made a LIDAR at tha…

Lidars are already used on the roads for speed and red light enforcement, e.g. products from Vitronic and Jenoptik. The wavelength is usually 850nm.

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

#60

Post by forgotmysn »

Animats wrote: post #29
forgotmysn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to profitability of competitors like velodyne and their existing lidar tech 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?

If more of these companies had real products, I'd expect them to at least be selling development kits. There are lots of industrial applications at the $1000 price point.

thats true, but not really the point im making.

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

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