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The Camera Is the Lidar

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Re: The Camera Is the Lidar

#41

Post by toomuchtodo »

Animats wrote: post #26
deepnotderp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Continental? Flash lidar seems to be a fundamentally broken concept to me wrt range.

One might think that, except that Advanced Scientific Concepts, which Continental bought, has had it working for a decade.[1] Their units work fine, but are expensive. They're mostly sold to DoD and used for space applications. The Space-X Dragon spacecraft uses one for docking. There's a tradeoff between field of view and range. Automotive systems will probably include a long-range narrow field of view unit and a sh…

What do you see as the key challenges in driving down the cost of flash LIDAR?

Re: The Camera Is the Lidar

#42

Post by toomuchtodo »

amelius wrote: post #36
maxerickson wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just make update transparency part of the initial certification. Of course they might cheat, but who really knows if their car has an airbag where it is supposed to.

> Just make update transparency part of the initial certification. Somehow I doubt the authorities have the foresight.

Even when they do, corporations will attempt to subvert process and policy "interlocks". See: Industry wide emissions cheating scandal.

Re: The Camera Is the Lidar

#43

Post by dllu »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #41
Animats wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One might think that, except that Advanced Scientific Concepts, which Continental bought, has had it working for a decade.[1] Their units work fine, but are expensive. They're mostly sold to DoD and used for space applications. The Space-X Dragon spacecraft uses one for docking. There's a tradeoff between field of view and range. Automotive systems will probably include a long-range narrow field of view unit and a sh…

What do you see as the key challenges in driving down the cost of flash LIDAR?

The light from the flash spreads out with the inverse square law, so you get much less signal compared with collimated laser beams. To compensate for that, you need much higher power. To get more power without blinding people, you need to use 1550 nm. This requires large arrays of exotic gallium arsenide semiconductors, which are expensive.

Re: The Camera Is the Lidar

#45

Post by simcop2387 »

foota wrote: post #38
deepnotderp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also note that in space there's way less background noise.

This made me curious, how wide is Earth's shadow the the height the space station is at?

I doubt it'd be significantly smaller than the diameter of the earth already. Can't think of how to set it up but the the ISS is only ~250mi above the earth so my guess would be only a couple hundred miles shorter than the earth's diameter at most.

Re: The Camera Is the Lidar

#46

Post by StavrosK »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #37
haney wrote: post #15

So I'm not up on the Lidar industry but $12k for a sensor seems really expensive, but then again from my casual observations Lidar is really expensive. Is there a physical / first principles reason this is true or is it just really new technology?

The most general answer to your question is Peter Drucker's (famous management guru) observation that every doubling of production of an item (over the lifetime, not yearly) resulted in a cost reduction of 20-30%. So right now, with very few LIDARs produced, we have a high price, which will start dropping as more are produced. You might find this interesting: a single transistor used to sell for roughly the equivalen…

At quantity 1, though, most of the cost is from the person who has to package it. Qty 100 will give you a much more accurate price.

Re: The Camera Is the Lidar

#47

Post by analognoise »

Animats wrote: post #26
deepnotderp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Continental? Flash lidar seems to be a fundamentally broken concept to me wrt range.

One might think that, except that Advanced Scientific Concepts, which Continental bought, has had it working for a decade.[1] Their units work fine, but are expensive. They're mostly sold to DoD and used for space applications. The Space-X Dragon spacecraft uses one for docking. There's a tradeoff between field of view and range. Automotive systems will probably include a long-range narrow field of view unit and a sh…

ASC is a textbook example of what not to do as a company. I honestly think their technology will be better implemented by someone else in a few years, which is tragic given how much of a head start they had. Eh.

Re: The Camera Is the Lidar

#48

Post by kumarvvr »

A semi-off topic question. Is it not possible to get an accurate depth map based on a two camera stereoscopic setup? Like human eyes? Perhaps combine it with video processing to isolate objects at different depths.

Re: The Camera Is the Lidar

#49

Post by post_break »

barbegal wrote: post #14

I'm sure this works well in bright light but I'm sceptical that this can perform at all well on overcast days or at night. The OS-1 device spins at 10Hz and the LIDAR samples 2048 points over one 360 degree revolution. This means each column of pixels is sampled at 1/20480 of a second. To sample that fast requires a lot of light which is fine on a sunny day but on a cloudy day you can have 100 time less light. And at…

Could you have a camera without the IR filter and then use IR leds to make up the difference? You would have to worry about other vehicles doing to same and blinding the cameras somehow but that might be a solution.

Re: The Camera Is the Lidar

#50

Post by lidarworld »

deepnotderp wrote: post #28
Animats wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One might think that, except that Advanced Scientific Concepts, which Continental bought, has had it working for a decade.[1] Their units work fine, but are expensive. They're mostly sold to DoD and used for space applications. The Space-X Dragon spacecraft uses one for docking. There's a tradeoff between field of view and range. Automotive systems will probably include a long-range narrow field of view unit and a sh…

What's the power output for the unit in the paper?

14-16 W

Velodyne's 64-channel is 60 W

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