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A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

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Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#21

Post by 0_____0 »

Animats wrote: post #8

That'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…

Waymo have in house radar, I think in the 70GHz gap in the absorption spectrum. They're pretty obvious as sort of paperback book sized planes, mounted near other sensors IIRC.

The old Velodyne units were actually susceptible to damage if you left two units running right next to each other. I did hear a proposal at some point for a different but similar unit to use GPS time to sync the rotations of all the units we had live so they wouldn't be pointed at each other, but in practice it seemed to not be a huge issue.

BTW I once gave you guff about continuing to bring up Conti's flash LIDAR, and in retrospect I wish I hadn't, I really enjoy your contributions here.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#22

Post by 0_____0 »

xnx wrote: post #9
rightbyte wrote: post #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…

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.

IIRC the data coming out of the Conti radars was preprocessed to give bearing, distance, and size of an object in the FOV of the unit. I don't know if I ever saw the true raw data out of one of them, but I'm curious what it looks like.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#23

Post by kieranmaine »

MaxPock wrote: post #3

Fantastic tech that Musk hates

In a recent No Priors podcast with the Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov, he talks about how they evaluated just driving with cameras and how it isn't good enough for full autonomy and doesn't meet their bar for safety [1].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE&t=1119s

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#24

Post by tgaj »

quonn wrote: post #4
MaxPock wrote: post #3

Fantastic 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.

Theoretically if a human can drive a car using a pair of eyes connected to brain, it should be possible to do that using two cameras connected to some kind of image processing unit.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#27

Post by itishappy »

0_____0 wrote: post #22
xnx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IIRC the data coming out of the Conti radars was preprocessed to give bearing, distance, and size of an object in the FOV of the unit. I don't know if I ever saw the true raw data out of one of them, but I'm curious what it looks like.

I'd be curious if the design of the Cybertruck affects readings at all. It's got angles straight outta an F-117.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#29

Post by fragmede »

tgaj wrote: post #24
quonn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Theoretically if a human can drive a car using a pair of eyes connected to brain, it should be possible to do that using two cameras connected to some kind of image processing unit.

If we want the sell driving computer to be only possibly as good as a human. I can't see in the dark, can't see through fog, and have trouble with rain. Why is human visibility the bar to meet here?

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#30

Post by jaimex2 »

kieranmaine wrote: post #23
MaxPock wrote: post #3

Fantastic tech that Musk hates

In a recent No Priors podcast with the Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov, he talks about how they evaluated just driving with cameras and how it isn't good enough for full autonomy and doesn't meet their bar for safety [1]. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE&t=1119s

They went deep down the wrong path and need to justify their mistake. Waymo will be killed off any day now.
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