Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by deepnotderp » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 12:18 AM UTC

wbl wrote: post #58

deepnotderp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, but if you Google "SPAD array" you'll find plenty of results. I'm sure ouster will be willing to sell you one also

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

#62

Post by brianwawok » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 3:15 AM UTC

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...

Do you notice when a butterfly covers your eye? Without LIDAR?

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

#63

Post by closeparen » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #55

closeparen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yeah, basically.

Patent trolling is a red herring - just a form of economic specialization. Selling your patents to a troll or hiring an attorney to enforce them for you are just different labels for the same transaction.

It's just that, in software anyway, many more things are patentable than ought to be. And arguably the whole concept behind patent law has proved unnecessary necessary in our field - "good" actors deduplicate efforts and share mutually beneficial IP via the open source community.

Someone in software using the patent system at all is probably acting in bad faith, or else building a moat to defend themselves from bad-faith actors.