> A $100 light weight Lidar is truly game changing for robots, self driving cars and drones. This is probably going to end up like the Oculus Rift; it won't be

> A $100 light weight Lidar is truly game changing for robots, self driving cars and drones. This is probably going to end up like the Oculus Rift; it won't be $100.00 - it will probably end up north of $500.00, possibly north of $1000.00. If it were easy, SICK or Hokuyo would have done it already. The fact that neither have can mean many things, of course, but I bet one of the big ones is that it isn't easy to pack a 3D LIDAR into a small package and make it robust and cheap. Both of those companies 2D LIDAR solutions already hit the robust portion; Hokuyo's offerings hit the small package portion (SICK's 2D systems are mostly the size of a coffeemaker - I own a couple), but neither company hits the low price mark. That could also mean that they have a niche market that's willing to pay those prices, but given the interest and want for fast 3D LIDAR for self-driving vehicles and other uses, the fact that they don't have anything out is telling. Now doing it all solid-state? Well - there are companies that have these systems as well (supposedly at least) - called "flash LIDAR"; essentially firing a laser to "flash" the scene, then using a grid-array of CCD-like high-speed elements to gather a 3D delay-time between the flash and reception. From what I've seen, for even the low-resolution modules, they make the former two companies offerings look dirt-cheap in comparison...