A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
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A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
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Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
#2Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
#3Fantastic tech that Musk hates
Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
#4Fantastic tech that Musk hates
It‘s not just Musk. Most automobile manufacturers have maintained that they need to find a way to do it with cheap and pretty sensors.
Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
#5"Its particular superpower is that it can generate high resolution images of its surroundings much better than radar can."
Is this true tough? Car radars are fixed. I guess a comparable lidar would be fixed too and have n points for n lasers.
A rovolving radar would have continuous resolution around while a lidar samples?
I thought the advantage of lidars were accuracy and being better at measuring heights of objects, where as radars flatten the view.
Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
#6"Its particular superpower is that it can generate high resolution images of its surroundings much better than radar can." Is this true tough? Car radars are fixed. I guess a comparable lidar would be fixed too and have n points for n lasers. A rovolving radar would have continuous resolution around while a lidar samples? I thought the advantage of lidars were accuracy and being better at measuring heights of objects…
Very high tech radars can generate amazing imagery, but they'll never top what lidar can do. Conceptually they're both doing the same sort of thing using EM radiation, but lidar uses a much smaller wavelength which gives it an intrinsic resolution advantage. Particularly at distances and with hardware sized relevant to cars.
Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
#7"Its particular superpower is that it can generate high resolution images of its surroundings much better than radar can." Is this true tough? Car radars are fixed. I guess a comparable lidar would be fixed too and have n points for n lasers. A rovolving radar would have continuous resolution around while a lidar samples? I thought the advantage of lidars were accuracy and being better at measuring heights of objects…
The issue isn't one of fixed vs rotation, it's that radar can't fundamentally achieve the resolution necessary to distinguish important features in the environment. It's easily fooled by oddly-shaped objects, especially concave features like corners, and so while it's great for answer the question of "am I close to something" it's not reliable for telling you what that something is, especially at longer ranges.
Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
#8That's a reasonable basic overview.
I'm surprised that rotating scanners are still used. It's been twenty years since Velodyne built their first one. They work OK, but cost too much. I was expecting flash LIDAR or MEMS mirrors to take over. Continental, the auto parts company, bought the leading flash LIDAR company over a decade ago, but the volume market a big parts company needs never appeared.
Waymo is still using rotating LIDARs even for the little ones at the vehicle corners. Those need less range. There needs to be a cheap, flush-mounted replacement for those things. The location is too vulnerable. Maybe millimeter phased array radar mounted behind Fiberglas body panels. Waymo needs to solve that problem before they do New York.
The LIDAR on top may not be a problem. Insisting that it has to go away to "look like a car" is like insisting that cars had to have the form factor of horse-propelled buggies. Early cars looked like buggies, but that didn't last.
One big advantage of pulsed LIDAR over continuous is that the interference problem between identical units is much less. The duty cycle is tiny. Data from one pulse round trip is collected in less than a microsecond. Just put some randomization in the pulse timing and getting multiple conflicts in a row goes away.
Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
#9"Its particular superpower is that it can generate high resolution images of its surroundings much better than radar can." Is this true tough? Car radars are fixed. I guess a comparable lidar would be fixed too and have n points for n lasers. A rovolving radar would have continuous resolution around while a lidar samples? I thought the advantage of lidars were accuracy and being better at measuring heights of objects…
I believe automotive radar has a cone of sensitivity that is read as a single "pixel" worth of data. Even if the radar spun like lidar, the radar cone of sensitivity is thousands of times wider than the lidar beam so you can't make much of a picture with radar.
Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
#10That's a reasonable basic overview. I'm surprised that rotating scanners are still used. It's been twenty years since Velodyne built their first one. They work OK, but cost too much. I was expecting flash LIDAR or MEMS mirrors to take over. Continental, the auto parts company, bought the leading flash LIDAR company over a decade ago, but the volume market a big parts company needs never appeared. Waymo is still using…
> They work OK, but cost too much.
Costs have dropped dramatically in the past 20 years and continue to do so.
> There needs to be a cheap, flush-mounted replacement for those things.
Why? Corners are the optimal mounting position for maximum visibility. It allows the car to -in-effect- see around corners in ways no centrally mounted sensor can.
> Waymo needs to solve that problem before they do New York.
What? Because of vandalism?