15 ms·
The cost of LIDAR is coming down
- supermatt 11y agoDoes anyone know of any examples of a "solid state" lidar as mentioned in the article? Im unable to visualise how such a thing would actually work, and its got me excited!
- huuu 11y agoMaybe they use a digital micromirror device also used in dlp projectors. By using a fish eye lens you could use the mirror array to look around and calculate the traveling distance of light pulses. I am also thinking about a 3d camera. Maybe those are getting good enought to measure distance.
- supermatt 11y agoI thought the micro-mirror approach would be considered electromechanical and not solid-state?
- oofoe 11y agoAnother possibility might be to use multiple solid state laser transmitter/receiver pairs located close together, kind of like ink-jet printer nozzles. Because they're discreet, you would lose some resolution compared to a continuous scan system, but it might be OK for the purpose of staying in a road. And, since the vehicle is moving (most of the time) anyway, maybe multiple returns can be integrated something like a synthetic aperture radar system to form a more complete picture.
- jburgess777 11y agoTime-of-Flight cameras are one option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-flight_camera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-flight_camera
- mhb 11y agohttp://hptg.com/industrial/ http://hptg.com/industrial/
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoFrom their site Based on the ToF principle, the cameras employ an integrated light source. The emitted light is reflected by objects in the scene and travels back to the camera, where the precise time of arrival is measured independently by each pixel of the image sensor, producing a per-pixel distance measurement.
- infocollector 11y agoIs there something like this available, but in the <$250 segment. These I understand are > $1000 market.
- Animats 11y agoThe second generation Kinect (the XBox 360 unit.)
- infocollector 11y agoLidar competes for outdoors scanning. Isnt kinect out of that game?
- mdorazio 11y agoTriLumina (http://trilumina.com/ http://trilumina.com/) was at Connected Car Expo this year. They didn't have an actual device to show, but they have developed a solid state LIDAR with some pictures and a data sheet on their website.
- Dwolb 11y agoLIDAR is pretty cool because you don't have to do object recognition on the point cloud to know what you shouldn't be bumping into - since the data comes back "already 3D" you have distance and size information and just need to calculate speed. Another benefit LIDAR has is its high resolution as compared to RADAR. Where LIDAR typically falls down is in adverse conditions (rain, snow, low sunlight in the horizon). There's a group at my university, MDAR, who is prototyping a tech to better overcome the adverse weather issues through a better laser sensing technique. Here's an article with a little more technical information [1]. Disclaimer: I've done some part time work on market research for MDAR. [1] http://articles.sae.org/13899/ http://articles.sae.org/13899/
- Someone 11y agoWhat I wonder about for LIDAR is how it will work when you have 20+ Cars using these devices simultaneously, say when driving on a busy road. Do they suffer from not being able to discriminate their own signals from those of the other cars, or is that (statistically) not a concern?
- jjoonathan 11y agoI suspect that a little bit of modulation cleverness goes a long way towards eliminating crosstalk.
- dogma1138 11y agoNot sure if you look at military applications then when a group of aircraft will fly in formation only 1 of them would have the radar on in active scan mode and the data is usually going to be shared over the data link. With phase shift due to movement and the uncertainty of how many cars are there around you modulation might not be enough to prevent cross talk.
- jjoonathan 11y agoYes, overload is real, you can never eliminate crosstalk only suppress it, and degenerate cases will probably pop up as the tehcnology scales. But coming to a compromise that allows every car to generate a map of the road should easily be possible. Well, "easily" in the technological sense, perhaps not the political sense. For military applications it's more useful to have one radar at high range/power than to have n radars at low range/power, while it's just the opposite for civilian lidar applications. So I don't see military radar SOP as evidence that this is inherently difficult.
- peloton 11y agoNot mentioned in article but bodes well for drones, aerial mapping, etc.
- deftnerd 11y agoI'm more excited by the possibility of a small light-weight LIDAR device that can be attached to drones for terrain mapping. My wife is an archaeologist and we've seen lots of discoveries of buried historical sites found by flying over areas with airplanes and expensive (and large) LIDAR systems. It would be great to be able to disrupt that with prosumer equipment.
- bsenftner 11y agoImagine this as a consumer technology: 3d scan your home, car, yard and I'm sure game developers will create titles that "take place" at your home.
- CardenB 11y agoSimilar to project Tango. It uses structured light for the same goals.
- spyder 11y agoIt's already possible to do it with any drone that can take good quality photos: http://www.makerbot.com/blog/tag/uav http://www.makerbot.com/blog/tag/uav The resolution depends on the quality of the pictures and the number of them.
- dimatura 11y agoYou can get a Velodyne "puck", that is light enough for many drones, for around $7k. The problem is that the scan density is not that great, so for many applications (e.g. archaeology) I suspect it's not worth it. Structure from Motion with good imagery can get some pretty good results these days.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoI'd hold on until MIT's new tech replaces the need for LIDAR: http://news.mit.edu/2015/algorithms-boost-3-d-imaging-resolution-1000-times-1201 http://news.mit.edu/2015/algorithms-boost-3-d-imaging-resolu...
- wycx 11y agoWhat wavelengths are typically used for LIDAR?
- dljsjr 11y agoInfrared.
- tomkinstinch 11y agoInfrared is a wide band though, 0.7µm-1mm. It looks like LIDAR products typically operate in the near-infrared, with two products I picked at random operating at 905nm[1] and 850nm[2]. They'd want to pick bands that are invisible to humans, ones where laser diodes exist that can be modulated, and ideally bands that suffer minimal attenuation from environmental factors like water. NIR meets those criteria pretty well. 1. http://velodynelidar.com/docs/datasheet/63-9229_VLP16_Datasheet_Rev-A_Web.pdf http://velodynelidar.com/docs/datasheet/63-9229_VLP16_Datash... 2. https://sick-virginia.data.continum.net/media/dox/6/16/516/Product_information_TIM_Series_Incrediby_good_at_detection_absolutely_accurate_at_measuring_en_IM0042516.PDF https://sick-virginia.data.continum.net/media/dox/6/16/516/P...
- TYPE_FASTER 11y agoFewer laser elements means cheaper, but also means lower resolution. I agree that a combination of video and radar works well for current active driver aids in cars. LIDAR isn't necessary.
- brianwawok 11y agoTrue but what resolution do we need? The smallest object a car would need to stop for would be what, a cat or racoon? We don't need snowflake resolution.
- TYPE_FASTER 11y ago32 elements might be able to detect objects that small. It depends on how far away they are.
- mSparks 11y agowhat's wrong with stereoscopic video cameras? turning them into a point cloud isn't that difficult and much better than lidar for recognition purposes.
- tomohawk 11y agoWhat happens after one of these things fails on a 10 year old car? Given the track record of most electronics on cars, this doesn't seem to be that unlikely. Given these kinds of liability concerns, it might be that reducing the cost of the tech won't reduce the cost of the product much.
- tim333 11y agoI guess the computer will tell you to get the sensor replaced? "By 2018, they are expecting to have a third-generation system in place which will be the size of a postage stamp and will sell for under $100." http://blog.lidarnews.com/postage-stamp-sized-lidar/#sthash.delhMrNV.gbpl http://blog.lidarnews.com/postage-stamp-sized-lidar/#sthash....
- Animats 11y agoFinally. I was pushing for this back in 2003, but the volume wasn't there. There are quite good eye-safe flash LIDAR units.[1] Advanced Scientific Concepts in Santa Barbara makes some.[1] A pulsed laser sends out a flash, and the receiver has a 128x128 pixel chip with time of flight counters for each pixel. Range in hundreds of meters, in sunlight. No moving parts except a fan. Cost is about $100K, because they are hand-made using custom ICs produced in tiny volumes. Space-X uses one on the Dragon spacecraft to dock with the space station. Back in 2003, when we were preparing for the DARPA Grand Challenge, I went down to Santa Monica to see the thing. But the demo was of components on an optical bench, aimed out a garage door into a parking lot. The technology wasn't ready to use yet, but it was clearly the right idea, something that would become cheap in volume. They were working more on making the device more sensitive than on making it cheaper, because they were getting DoD funding. Some of their units even have a photomultiplier tube stage, like an image intensifier. The photoelectric effect is at the atomic level, and so fast you can use it in front of a time of flight device. So we ended up using the SICK LMS scanner, like everybody else. There's a tradeoff between field of view and range with flash LIDAR, because there's a limited amount of illumination power. A single one of these devices won't give a full circle of scan, like the Velodyne rotating devices. There's a cheaper, but less precise, approach, used in the Kinect 360. That's the ZCam technology. See p. 13 of this paper [2] for how it works. It's a phase-shift type LIDAR; the outgoing beam is modulated with an RF signal, and the phase shift of the RF carrier is measured on return. That's also all solid state, but not as good at rejecting interfering illumination. It doesn't have digital counters for each pixel; the timing system is analog. So they don't need counters running at tens of GHz behind every pixel. Once someone is ready to order > 100,000 flash LIDARs, they'll get cheap. The technology is not inherently that expensive. The main reason for having a LIDAR is not to see obstacles. It's to profile the terrain ahead. You can detect potholes and drop-offs. Since we were driving off-road for the DARPA Grand Challenge, that was absolutely essential. Automatic driving systems for on-road use can sleaze by without doing that. Most of the time. Until they encounter a big pothole, or are misled by road markings into a ditch. That's why Google has that LIDAR up on top. [1] http://www.advancedscientificconcepts.com/ http://www.advancedscientificconcepts.com/ [2] http://tesi.cab.unipd.it/47172/1/Tesi_1057035.pdf http://tesi.cab.unipd.it/47172/1/Tesi_1057035.pdf
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- melted 11y agoSince there are so many experts on the thread, say these are deployed in every car on the road. How will one tell its own laser reflection from everybody else's, if there's a hundred lidars per city block scanning simultaneously?
- owenversteeg 11y agoLight travels really fast. As each pulse has an extremely short length, and there aren't that many scans per second comparative to the lengths of the pulses, collisions should be rare. When you do have a collision, it will look completely different from the pulses around it, so you can easily discard it.
- melted 11y agoAre you guessing or do you know this for a fact? I know that in radars for example this is dealt with using matched filters (i.e. filters tuned to extract known, but delayed signal through correlation), but that requires continuous, modulated signal.
- hokkos 11y agoLIDAR is not the only way for visual odometry as shown with the kitti challenge, stero camera show similar accuracy than LIDAR : http://www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti/eval_odometry.php http://www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti/eval_odometry.php The same is true for object detection : http://www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti/eval_object.php http://www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti/eval_object.php And tracking : http://www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti/eval_tracking.php http://www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti/eval_tracking.php