41–50 of 122 posts
Only temperature rated to -4F degrees. I hope they can get that lower. Up to ~25 days a year are <0F in Chicago for instance.
Anyone have a LIDAR (or similar) product suggestion? I'm getting ready to start a hobby project that involves scanning the interior surfaces of a house. Ideally the accuracy would be at least 1/16" (1.5mm), including any scan-stitching required because the sensor had to be moved around. I've seen a few promising products, but none stands out as a perfect match.
https://www.boschtools.com/us/en/boschtools-ocs/laser-measur...
They have 1-2mm accuracy and quite good precision, particularly if your environment is stable (temperature, movement, lighting). These modules use an interferometry approach rather than time of flight to achieve their accuracy.
Several of them have a Bluetooth interface which you could reverse-engineer. The work then would be creating a turret to rotate the unit around a known centerpoint and take a bunch of samples. It'd be slow, but it works.
There are also a bunch of modules available on Alibaba for a few tens of dollars that have serial interfaces and seem to have similar performance - they often have 10s of Hz sample rates, so you could speed up scanning quite a lot. They exhibit similar accuracy to the boxed units I've bought, but require you to be comfortable with things like SPI and soldering.
Anyone have a LIDAR (or similar) product suggestion? I'm getting ready to start a hobby project that involves scanning the interior surfaces of a house. Ideally the accuracy would be at least 1/16" (1.5mm), including any scan-stitching required because the sensor had to be moved around. I've seen a few promising products, but none stands out as a perfect match.
> Ouster’s engineers have paid to ensure every sensor stands up to the wear and tear IOW, no one is sure if it actually will
We make a point of this because legacy spinning lidar is unreliable. But it's unreliable because of the analog design, not because spinning is inherently unreliable.
Alas, the price of these devices has to come down at least one order of magnitude. Maybe even two. Still, I am really thankful that other companies (since Tesla has no interest in it) are considering and further developing LIDAR.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it more or less a forgone conclusion that a good LiDAR sensor would not be affected by potentially hundreds of other similar or identical ones shining their beams across the same region?
For FMCW, there should be no interference at all for any number of sensors (there is more information in the link in my original comment). For pulsed lidar, it's an issue of how well you engineer it. I can confidently say a good sensor can regularly withstand dozens of sensors operating simultaneously in a small area because I've personally witnessed it. The devil is largely in the details of specifications and manuf…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Of course, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, this means you also get worse distance estimation. This isn't how the Heisenberg uncertainty principle works. For macroscopic objects, the effects are completely dwarfed by other phenomenon. Keep in mind that Planck's constant is 10^{-33} meters.
I was actually wondering about this the other day. So what equation(s) would you use to determine the variance in distance estimation relative to velocity estimation? And it sounds like you're strongly implying the distance variation is immeasurably small while accurately estimating velocity - is this correct? I'm not sure the macro point makes sense, since you could have a large object with only one point measuring…
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle#Signal_p...
Does anyone know whether eye safety is de facto maintained when your eye is being continuously bombarded by the 100+ scanning lasers being emitted from each of the 100 cars in the vicinity of an intersection? I'm on board with the case with a handful of lasers scanning by quickly but the energy may really start to add up in certain plausible future scenarios.
I swear I get persistence of vision artifacts when I see a LIDAR equipped vehicle, but need to run a double blind test to be sure.
Am surprised no one yet cited Elon saying "this is fool's errand" because of price, complexity, etc. I think LIDAR will improve significantly the safety of vehicles (autonomous or not) because it can definitely see better and deeper, even in damning weather conditions (rain, fog, haze). Alas, the price of these devices has to come down at least one order of magnitude. Maybe even two. Still, I am really thankful that…
Tesla cars have radar which can see through any weather condition and detect transparent surfaces, invisible to LIDAR.