15 ms·

Alphabet’s Waymo Cuts Cost of Key Self-Driving Sensor by 90%

311 points by smaddali 10y ago

Animats 10y ago
Waymo isn't the first to announce a low-cost LIDAR. Quantergy announced one last year.[1] They even demoed it. It never shipped. Continental, the big European auto parts company acquired ASC's excellent but expensive technology last year, and promised a low-cost version. Hasn't shipped yet.[2] These things will get cheap as soon as they're being built in quantity 100,000, instead of quantity 100. Really cheap if they can be made with standard CMOS processes, which has been done experimentally. Most are GaInAs technology, which is expensive. [1] http://quanergy.com/s3/ http://quanergy.com/s3/ [2] http://www.continental-corporation.com/www/pressportal_com_en/themes/press_releases/3_automotive_group/chassis_safety/press_releases/pr_2016_03_03_3dlidar_en.html http://www.continental-corporation.com/www/pressportal_com_e...
- Game_Ender 10y ago
  Quanergy never shipped their product because they were not able to hit the required for performance for it to be usable. So far it looks like only Waymo and Velodyne have shipped LIDAR sensors good enough to the primary sensor on a self driving car. Everyone else is still at the "vaporware" stage.
- candiodari 10y ago
  The best cheap lidar for indoor robots, and limited outdoor is built by microsoft, called "kinect". Beats the pants of any lidar that existed in 2005 that cost less than $100k, except on range. Comes with open source libraries and is a pretty great piece of equipment for indoor navigation.
  - zardeh 10y ago
    Minus the part where it isn't a lidar. Sure its a great sensor, but if you need a lidar, then you can't use a kinect. And alternatively, if you need 360 degree fov, etc. an actual lider is often better.
  - jsjohnst 10y ago
    IR sensor array != to LIDAR. There is no pulsed Laser in Kinect.
- jayjay71 10y ago
  > They even demoed it. Sort of. "Quanergy has not yet demonstrated a version of the S3 that performs to the specifications that they announced at their press conference" http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sensors/quanergy-solid-state-lidar http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sens...
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Ok, that was a fairly odd press release. I thought that Waymo might be going to sell a LIDAR sensor that anyone could use in their projects, but that isn't the case. They mention that they have stuck in Chrysler's Pacifica minivan (but this from a previous partnership agreement) and there isn't anyone else participating. And Krafcik says again and again things like "potential", "some day", and "we can imagine". He mentions their LIDAR tech can tell which way a pedestrian is facing. But since there are no prices, there are no products, there are no actual announcements, it seems to boil down to Google feeling the heat as the company that used to be associated with the notion of bring Self Driving cars to the market. I wonder if they have been doing consumer surveys on what people think about Self Driving cars and finding out that Google is rapidly dropping from the radar of most people. They don't make cars, they can't get people to partner with them, and they haven't been successful at showing meaningful progress. Meanwhile in the bay area you can't drive down any freeway and not see some chortling Tesla owner talking to their friends while the car moves them along in rush hour traffic. Additionally: For me the interesting thing is that Tesla has spent perhaps 5B$ on developing a self driving Model S between 2011 and 2016. And in that same time period Google went from $45B of cash on hand to $83B by Q3 of 2016, so they picked up and literally sat on nearly $40B over the last 5 years. Guess what? Cash sitting in the bank doesn't invent things, it doesn't build things, it doesn't "change the world" and it doesn't make you a leader. Can you imagine where they would be if they had used $10B of that to build a competitive electric car company?
- RivieraKid 10y ago
  Public perception doesn't matter that much because the customers are car makers. What matters is their technology, which seems to be state-of-the-art and certainly better than what Tesla has.
  - marricks 10y ago
    Is it though? What Google has is certainly better than the publicly available lane and crash assist Tesla has, but Tesla has already shown demos of true autonomous driving, in fog and noting pedestrians, etc. It likely just needs a lot of training but cars are already on the road with hardware. Is Google ahead for a final product? Quite possibly, but they don't have a product and Tesla doesn't look far behind sortware wise, though it is hard to tell.
curiouscat321 10y ago
Lots of Detroit based news coming from Waymo. I wonder how long it will be until Waymo has a larger base of operations in the area and makes a significant hiring push?
- diracdelta 10y ago
  May already be happening. Anecdote: A real estate agent in Ann Arbor told me this week that most of her recent customers are coming in to work for Waymo.
  - zump 10y ago
    Why MI and not CA?
    - wstrange 10y ago
      Far better to develop a self driving car in shitty road conditions, potholes, black ice, fog, drifting snow...
      - huxley 10y ago
        As someone living in an area with shitty road conditions, if they can conquer those that is the point at which I start becoming a believer.
      - zump 10y ago
        Why not India then?
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Auto companies (and suppliers and so on) have a lot of engineering operations in Southeast Michigan.
    - notatoad 10y ago
      If their business plan is to partner with car companies, Detroit is where the car companies live.
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
What happens when every car on the road has lidar and your sensor is bombarded by oncoming traffic?
- threeseed 10y ago
  Thankfully the large physical size of the car means that the amount of sensor data is going to be at a maximum when you're on a busy highway and fairly minimal. Something that is constantly modelled today. It's a very interesting question especially if self driving motorcycles take off which have the ability to move in highly unpredictable ways.
  - Animats 10y ago
    With flash LIDAR, the duty cycle is very low. A ranging cycle is about 1μs, while you might cycle at 60FPS. The chance of interference is only about 1/10000 for each ranging cycle. If you put a bit of random jitter in the flash timing, you can avoid accidental repeated interference. You'll get a bad frame once in a while, but if the frames on both sides of the bad one look similar, you're OK. You can tell if someone is aiming a big light source at you; all the pixels show the same range, probably zero. Those rotating machinery Velodyne things may not be as immune, but that technology isn't going to be high-volume.
    - asdfasdfa11112 10y ago
      Doesnt this limit you to at least a 50 ms response time, before your CPU can "trust" the data? (before/current/next required to smooth before handing off to processing?)
      - euyyn 10y ago
        In the odd case that the data is clearly garbage, you'll just drop it and keep going as before (so you add a frame to the response time at that specific moment). In the general case of data affected by noise, it shouldn't be a problem: These things run a simulation of the external world, and every new input frame is never fully trusted, just used probabilistically to update the simulation. It is expected to carry noise, so if your sensors would tell you something like "a pedestrian in the sidewalk just jumped 10m in the air", you'd deduce "the guy most probably has kept walking as he was doing before, he possibly jumped instead, or he might have changed directions instead".
DonnyV 10y ago
This is great but its still LIDAR. Which doesn't do to well when it rains, snows or its foggy out.
vgeek 10y ago
Earnings date must be approaching, try to distract that they're still just only an online ad company?
- RushAndAPush 10y ago
  It's going to be alright. I didn't get a job at Google either.
  - knicholes 10y ago
    But there were positive notes in your interviews! They'll be sure to call again next summer!... They say 3rd time's the charm.
mankash666 10y ago
The press release is light on actual numbers. If they can build LIDARs much cheaper than the competition, and use Google's TPUs for the AI, they might have a genuine differentiator for a few years
frik 10y ago
Beside LIDAR, A/Google adds a radar now too. I wonder if more and more vehicles have now a radar, isn't it unhealthy to be exposed to so many radar on the road? I mean it's well known that military grade radar can be very unhealthy. I would have assumed that LIDAR plus cameras plus ultrasonic would be enough.
- MagnumOpus 10y ago
  Military grade radars can run at peak power output of over 1MW; airport ATC radars at around 100kW. Given the power limitation of cars, car radars will be under a kW for sure, probably more in the single-watt range. And health effects start happening if you absorb more than 1kW on a small area of your skin (burns, eye damage etc) - unlikely to happen if the total emission is sub-kilowatt. (I presume there are regulatory limits for this sort of emission anyway, by FCC or otherwise, but I don't know for sure...)
cr0sh 10y ago
If it's $7500 for a 3D LIDAR (that is, a cheaper version of the Velodyne LIDAR system) - then that puts in range of SICK and Hokuyo 2D LIDAR sensors, although both of those only have around 180 degree FOV - but they both have a similar price tag (IIRC, around $3-4K per unit). Still - that's a large fraction of the cost of vehicle, so I don't see it as that great of a breakthrough on price. Honestly, I personally think that we'll see flash LIDAR or some other non-mechanical scanning tech (along with machine vision cameras - or maybe only such cameras) being used. Indeed, if machine vision cameras could be made to see in a wider range of wavelengths (maybe into near IR and UV?), and also have quick adjustable focus, and some way to deal with dirt and debris - such cameras would probably be the best way to implement sensing. Ultimately, the issue isn't so much with the sensors, but with the software; integration of the sensor data into a cohesive whole and then interpreting it properly is far from a solved task (deep learning seems to work well?). /I'm probably rambling out of my nether regions, tho

311 points by smaddali 10y ago

Waymo isn't the first to announce a low-cost LIDAR. Quantergy announced one last year.[1] They even demoed it. It never shipped. Continental, the big European auto parts company acquired ASC's excellent but expensive technology last year, and promised a low-cost version. Hasn't shipped yet.[2] These things will get cheap as soon as they're being built in quantity 100,000, instead of quantity 100. Really cheap if they can be made with standard CMOS processes, which has been done experimentally. Most are GaInAs technology, which is expensive. [1] http://quanergy.com/s3/ http://quanergy.com/s3/ [2] http://www.continental-corporation.com/www/pressportal_com_en/themes/press_releases/3_automotive_group/chassis_safety/press_releases/pr_2016_03_03_3dlidar_en.html http://www.continental-corporation.com/www/pressportal_com_e...

Game_Ender 10y ago
Quanergy never shipped their product because they were not able to hit the required for performance for it to be usable. So far it looks like only Waymo and Velodyne have shipped LIDAR sensors good enough to the primary sensor on a self driving car. Everyone else is still at the "vaporware" stage.
candiodari 10y ago
The best cheap lidar for indoor robots, and limited outdoor is built by microsoft, called "kinect". Beats the pants of any lidar that existed in 2005 that cost less than $100k, except on range. Comes with open source libraries and is a pretty great piece of equipment for indoor navigation.
- zardeh 10y ago
  Minus the part where it isn't a lidar. Sure its a great sensor, but if you need a lidar, then you can't use a kinect. And alternatively, if you need 360 degree fov, etc. an actual lider is often better.
- jsjohnst 10y ago
  IR sensor array != to LIDAR. There is no pulsed Laser in Kinect.
jayjay71 10y ago
> They even demoed it. Sort of. "Quanergy has not yet demonstrated a version of the S3 that performs to the specifications that they announced at their press conference" http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sensors/quanergy-solid-state-lidar http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sens...

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Ok, that was a fairly odd press release. I thought that Waymo might be going to sell a LIDAR sensor that anyone could use in their projects, but that isn't the case. They mention that they have stuck in Chrysler's Pacifica minivan (but this from a previous partnership agreement) and there isn't anyone else participating. And Krafcik says again and again things like "potential", "some day", and "we can imagine". He mentions their LIDAR tech can tell which way a pedestrian is facing. But since there are no prices, there are no products, there are no actual announcements, it seems to boil down to Google feeling the heat as the company that used to be associated with the notion of bring Self Driving cars to the market. I wonder if they have been doing consumer surveys on what people think about Self Driving cars and finding out that Google is rapidly dropping from the radar of most people. They don't make cars, they can't get people to partner with them, and they haven't been successful at showing meaningful progress. Meanwhile in the bay area you can't drive down any freeway and not see some chortling Tesla owner talking to their friends while the car moves them along in rush hour traffic. Additionally: For me the interesting thing is that Tesla has spent perhaps 5B$ on developing a self driving Model S between 2011 and 2016. And in that same time period Google went from $45B of cash on hand to $83B by Q3 of 2016, so they picked up and literally sat on nearly $40B over the last 5 years. Guess what? Cash sitting in the bank doesn't invent things, it doesn't build things, it doesn't "change the world" and it doesn't make you a leader. Can you imagine where they would be if they had used $10B of that to build a competitive electric car company?

RivieraKid 10y ago
Public perception doesn't matter that much because the customers are car makers. What matters is their technology, which seems to be state-of-the-art and certainly better than what Tesla has.
- marricks 10y ago
  Is it though? What Google has is certainly better than the publicly available lane and crash assist Tesla has, but Tesla has already shown demos of true autonomous driving, in fog and noting pedestrians, etc. It likely just needs a lot of training but cars are already on the road with hardware. Is Google ahead for a final product? Quite possibly, but they don't have a product and Tesla doesn't look far behind sortware wise, though it is hard to tell.

curiouscat321 10y ago

Lots of Detroit based news coming from Waymo. I wonder how long it will be until Waymo has a larger base of operations in the area and makes a significant hiring push?

diracdelta 10y ago
May already be happening. Anecdote: A real estate agent in Ann Arbor told me this week that most of her recent customers are coming in to work for Waymo.
- zump 10y ago
  Why MI and not CA?
  - wstrange 10y ago
    Far better to develop a self driving car in shitty road conditions, potholes, black ice, fog, drifting snow...
    - huxley 10y ago
      As someone living in an area with shitty road conditions, if they can conquer those that is the point at which I start becoming a believer.
    - zump 10y ago
      Why not India then?
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Auto companies (and suppliers and so on) have a lot of engineering operations in Southeast Michigan.
  - notatoad 10y ago
    If their business plan is to partner with car companies, Detroit is where the car companies live.

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

What happens when every car on the road has lidar and your sensor is bombarded by oncoming traffic?

threeseed 10y ago
Thankfully the large physical size of the car means that the amount of sensor data is going to be at a maximum when you're on a busy highway and fairly minimal. Something that is constantly modelled today. It's a very interesting question especially if self driving motorcycles take off which have the ability to move in highly unpredictable ways.
- Animats 10y ago
  With flash LIDAR, the duty cycle is very low. A ranging cycle is about 1μs, while you might cycle at 60FPS. The chance of interference is only about 1/10000 for each ranging cycle. If you put a bit of random jitter in the flash timing, you can avoid accidental repeated interference. You'll get a bad frame once in a while, but if the frames on both sides of the bad one look similar, you're OK. You can tell if someone is aiming a big light source at you; all the pixels show the same range, probably zero. Those rotating machinery Velodyne things may not be as immune, but that technology isn't going to be high-volume.
  - asdfasdfa11112 10y ago
    Doesnt this limit you to at least a 50 ms response time, before your CPU can "trust" the data? (before/current/next required to smooth before handing off to processing?)
    - euyyn 10y ago
      In the odd case that the data is clearly garbage, you'll just drop it and keep going as before (so you add a frame to the response time at that specific moment). In the general case of data affected by noise, it shouldn't be a problem: These things run a simulation of the external world, and every new input frame is never fully trusted, just used probabilistically to update the simulation. It is expected to carry noise, so if your sensors would tell you something like "a pedestrian in the sidewalk just jumped 10m in the air", you'd deduce "the guy most probably has kept walking as he was doing before, he possibly jumped instead, or he might have changed directions instead".

DonnyV 10y ago

This is great but its still LIDAR. Which doesn't do to well when it rains, snows or its foggy out.

vgeek 10y ago

Earnings date must be approaching, try to distract that they're still just only an online ad company?

RushAndAPush 10y ago
It's going to be alright. I didn't get a job at Google either.
- knicholes 10y ago
  But there were positive notes in your interviews! They'll be sure to call again next summer!... They say 3rd time's the charm.

mankash666 10y ago

The press release is light on actual numbers. If they can build LIDARs much cheaper than the competition, and use Google's TPUs for the AI, they might have a genuine differentiator for a few years

frik 10y ago

Beside LIDAR, A/Google adds a radar now too. I wonder if more and more vehicles have now a radar, isn't it unhealthy to be exposed to so many radar on the road? I mean it's well known that military grade radar can be very unhealthy. I would have assumed that LIDAR plus cameras plus ultrasonic would be enough.

MagnumOpus 10y ago
Military grade radars can run at peak power output of over 1MW; airport ATC radars at around 100kW. Given the power limitation of cars, car radars will be under a kW for sure, probably more in the single-watt range. And health effects start happening if you absorb more than 1kW on a small area of your skin (burns, eye damage etc) - unlikely to happen if the total emission is sub-kilowatt. (I presume there are regulatory limits for this sort of emission anyway, by FCC or otherwise, but I don't know for sure...)

cr0sh 10y ago

If it's $7500 for a 3D LIDAR (that is, a cheaper version of the Velodyne LIDAR system) - then that puts in range of SICK and Hokuyo 2D LIDAR sensors, although both of those only have around 180 degree FOV - but they both have a similar price tag (IIRC, around $3-4K per unit). Still - that's a large fraction of the cost of vehicle, so I don't see it as that great of a breakthrough on price. Honestly, I personally think that we'll see flash LIDAR or some other non-mechanical scanning tech (along with machine vision cameras - or maybe only such cameras) being used. Indeed, if machine vision cameras could be made to see in a wider range of wavelengths (maybe into near IR and UV?), and also have quick adjustable focus, and some way to deal with dirt and debris - such cameras would probably be the best way to implement sensing. Ultimately, the issue isn't so much with the sensors, but with the software; integration of the sensor data into a cohesive whole and then interpreting it properly is far from a solved task (deep learning seems to work well?). /I'm probably rambling out of my nether regions, tho