9 ms·

Waymo: Bringing 3D perimeter Lidar to partners

136 points by Fricken 8y ago

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
This sounds much more like illegal antitrust behavior as reported by independent media: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18252561/waymo-sell-lidar-laser-sensor-av-customer-robot-taxi-competition https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18252561/waymo-sell-lidar-... "Select partners" can mean "those who won't compete with us".
- tacomonstrous 8y ago
  Don't really understand how this is anti-trust behavior. Is a company not allowed to choose whom it's selling its products to?
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Generally, no. Usually the right of first sale ensures anyone can buy a product, if not from the original manufacturer, than from a reseller. Extremely tight distribution chains designed to prevent a competitor from getting a hold of your product is pretty darn rare. And when it's a monopoly that's already repeatedly demonstrated monopolist behavior, it's even less permissible. So they have a patent monopoly on the hardware, already shown they'll fight in court to protect it (re: Uber), and will prevent anyone from buying that hardware if it's a potential competitor to their service-based business. Their choice to sell the hardware makes it a separate market than their ride-sharing service, and one could argue a violation of antitrust law if they're blocking competitors from one market from buying their product in another.
    - joshuamorton 8y ago
      There's no such thing as a "patent monopoly", and there are multiple competitors in this space (4? mentioned in the article). The idea that there's a meaningful monopoly here is strange, to say the least. Unless you're actually trying to argue that "warehouse lidar produced by Google" is a meaningfully different market than "warehouse lidar", which completely contravenes both written law and precedent. Also the right of first sale is trademark/copyright law, not contract law. Companies are absolutely allowed to create non-trademark agreements, and they do all the time. Think software licenses.
      - UncleEntity 8y ago
        > Also the right of first sale is trademark/copyright law, not contract law. And apparently patent law, you can't use your patents to force someone who legally acquired a device to not do something with it. So, if one legally got their hands on one of these things there's not a thing waymo could do to them if they were "misusing" it.
- bnt 8y ago
  Calling The Verge “independent” is a bit missleading.
  - nevir 8y ago
    Why is that?
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    True, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt, since they're being critical of Google here, despite their incredibly cozy relationship with Google. Numerous Google executives have done exclusive interviews particularly with The Verge, all the way up to Sundar Pichai, so there's definitely some question whenever they praise Google if there's a conflict of interest or incentive for them to give Google a positive spin. I assume, of course, you were likely trying to make some sort of "iVerge" claim here, but the reality is, The Verge gives Google incredibly favorable press coverage as well. At the end of the day, The Verge is a business that's in it for clicks, and exclusive interviews and insider access equals clicks. So The Verge will shill for just about any company that can give them scoops, including both Apple and Google. Both companies are notoriously brutal to sites that write critically about them, and The Verge avoids heavily criticizing either in most cases, as to not jeopardize their access.
- glenrivard 8y ago
  Would expect it means will not sell to competitors. Nothing wrong with that in the US. Are you American?
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  The blog post itself says they will sell only to "select partners." The Verge's article doesn't add anything, and it doesn't claim it's illegal.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  It's a safety-critical component. All they have to do to prevent competitors from using it would be to only certify its use in limited contexts.
gbersac 8y ago
There's no information about price. I heard that lidar's price was a massive problem for their mass adoption and the reason why Tesla try not to use them for self-driving cars. If its price would be signinficantly lower than other lidars, it would be a real breakthrough. Any idea about its price ?
- smt88 8y ago
  I would imagine Waymo wants to sell them to other companies to reach better economies of scale and bring their own prices down. It'd be interesting to hear from someone who knows specifics of LIDAR manufacturing, though.
- Fricken 8y ago
  Waymo isn't disclosing price. Part of their reason for taking this initiative is to find a market that justifies scaled production of their devices, as a means of driving the costs down. Everyone in the Lidar bubble hopes to someday have Lidar that is both cheap and good, and such a product is likely years away, for Waymo or anyone else. This announcement reads like a 'Plan B' for Waymo's lidar team. Waymo's talk of buying 20k Jaguar Ipaces and 60k Chrysler Pacificas for robotaxi deployment is indefinitely on hold, and if that was playing out the way they wanted it to, then Waymo's lidar production team would have more important things to do than fishing around for a secondary Lidar market to sell their wares to.
  - cloudwalking 8y ago
    Can you cite a source for vehicle purchasing on hold?
    - Fricken 8y ago
      I'm not saying they cancelled their puchasing order. When they announced those purchasing orders a year ago Waymo's PR was singing a different tune, they've missed a lot of targets between then and now. It's hard to paint a plausible scenario where they deployed even 10k of those robotaxis over the next few years, let alone all 80,000 of them.
iandanforth 8y ago
Can someone give me some other common examples of will-not-compete clauses in sales agreements? (This post implies they have one.) I'm drawing a blank.
- smt88 8y ago
  A lot of web APIs, especially for B2B SaaS, come with these. Uber's does, too.
polskibus 8y ago
It's great that Waymo has decided to start selling bits of their tech. That's in contrast to other Alphabet-developed hardware like TPU (for training, not inference). I wonder whether 'for selected partners only' is going to be temporary or permanent restriction.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  > Now, we are making these sensors available to companies outside of self-driving — beginning with robotics, security, agricultural technology, and more — so they can achieve their own technological breakthroughs. It will likely come with licensing and non-compete agreements.
  - polskibus 8y ago
    It would be as bad as lack of right to repair. If it happens , then I hope someone like Intel does the same to them.
- kajecounterhack 8y ago
  I'm not sure TPU is a good example. That one is already super Google specific and difficult to externalize except through a hosted service. Google's internal infra is pretty complex.
  - polskibus 8y ago
    It's not super Google specific if it is supported by tensorflow. Yes there may be some obstacles to using it to in your home pc, but there should be at least a paid way to use it if you want in your own server.
    - kajecounterhack 8y ago
      > It's not super Google specific if it is supported by tensorflow. That's simply not true. If framework X supports <client that connects to complex hosted service Y> then "using it in my home PC" isn't automatically possible.
mtgx 8y ago
I imagine there's some sort of "bait and switch" here where Google gets what it has always wanted and most car makers have refused to give it: access full car data and telemetry.
lnsru 8y ago
Any speculation about specifications of this device? How many points per second does it produce? No info in the article and on Waymo’s page. What it can do more than current lidar from Sick or Teradyne?
- kyle_martin1 8y ago
  Way more. They say it has a 95 degrees vertical FOV and 360 degrees FOV. The vertical FOV is awesome actually. A Velodyne VLP-16 has roughly 30 degrees FOV. We need the vertical and horizontal angular resolution to make any real judgements though.
ElijahLynn 8y ago
Brainstorm thread: What are some novel ideas outside of self-driving that the Waymo Lidar Sensor could be used for? And what could be done if it goes below $1,000 (e.g. video games)?
- lnsru 8y ago
  You already have 2 generations of MS Kinect. It can already stream RGB-D images, lidar provides no color information. There is no killer application for cheap lidar, there are many cheap devices covering <10 meter distance range with great resolution and their adoption is still extremely low.
  - fudgy73 8y ago
    *technically 3: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kinect-dk/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kinect-dk/
- msadowski 8y ago
  They say they can record multiple returns per single pulse. This can really useful for forest mapping (e.g. on a drone). For video games maybe but I'd always try to avoid looking at those, even if LiDARs are eye safe it's not fun staring at them.
  - ElijahLynn 8y ago
    Wow, detailed forest mapping! What are some things that would be doable with detailed forrest maps?
    - CobrastanJorji 8y ago
      Perhaps mapping tree growth in response to some environmental changes, or detecting illegal logging, or measuring the impact of wildfires, or, maybe if it does a good job of detecting animals, mapping the migrations/populations of endangered, larger mammals? Alternately, a cheap way to produce amazingly accurate video game maps of your neighborhood.
Animats 8y ago
The self-driving industry has not progressed fast enough to get LIDAR prices down. Continental announced a good automotive flash LIDAR several years ago.[1] They're a big auto parts company; they need an order on the scale of typical auto parts to start volume production. The solid-state solutions are potentially cheaper, but involve custom ICs, which need volume to get the price down. (Continental's technology is from Advanced Scientific Concepts, which makes high-end LIDAR units. The Dragon spacecraft uses one for docking. Costs about $100K. So it's not vaporware, like some of their startup competitors.) [1] https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Landing-Pages/CAD/Automated-Driving/GlobalHighlights/3D-Flash-Lidar https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Landing-Pages/C...
- choppaface 8y ago
  Well there's Livox with a $600 unit: https://www.livoxtech.com/ https://www.livoxtech.com/ Initial reviews[1] on the internet show it looks pretty decent for the price. There are certainly better sensors, but I would argue we have indeed entered the sub-$1,000-lidar-phase of the SDC era. As if Andrej Karpathy needed anything more to worry about. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/UAVmapping/comments/aimnik/livox_mid40_lidar_first_review_with_pictures/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UAVmapping/comments/aimnik/livox_mi...
leesec 8y ago
Seems like a good time to mention Waymo has a valuation of 75 billion dollars and has yet to make any revenue. Maybe they will start to bring in some money!
- Jyaif 8y ago
  They do have revenue (although the cars have safety drivers).
pavon 8y ago
Interesting that they designed it with 360 degree horizontal field of view when they are using it on the bumper of the car.
synaesthesisx 8y ago
Anyone know if this is a solid-state unit? I've heard Velodyne has a new solid state array in the works, but no idea how it compares to something like this. At CES this year there were quite a few vendors with various flash LIDAR tech.
- kyle_martin1 8y ago
  It's not solid state because it's moving. Solid state usually uses an IR flash technology. :)
kyle_martin1 8y ago
I work as a lead autonomous vehicle engineer and have designed a sensor suite. Here's a few thoughts: * They say it has a 95 degrees vertical FOV and 360 degrees FOV. The vertical FOV is awesome actually. A Velodyne VLP-16 has roughly 30 degrees FOV. We need the vertical and horizontal angular resolution to make any first-take judgements though. * One overlooked feature I want to point out is that the Minimum Range is 0. Many lidars perform well at far distances but struggle to see objects very close (<1 meter away). This poses a safety issue as someone or something is effectively invisible to the robot if they're too close. Of course you can use cameras to handle this case but this is a big win for the Waymo hardware team! * They're going to be 15k+ (gut estimate) ------------------------------------------------ By the way, if you want to to become an autonomous vehicle engineer I put together a resource guide here: https://becomeautonomous.com https://becomeautonomous.com
- sdave 8y ago
  Thanks for the excellent resource Kyle!

136 points by Fricken 8y ago

This sounds much more like illegal antitrust behavior as reported by independent media: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18252561/waymo-sell-lidar-laser-sensor-av-customer-robot-taxi-competition https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18252561/waymo-sell-lidar-... "Select partners" can mean "those who won't compete with us".

tacomonstrous 8y ago
Don't really understand how this is anti-trust behavior. Is a company not allowed to choose whom it's selling its products to?
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Generally, no. Usually the right of first sale ensures anyone can buy a product, if not from the original manufacturer, than from a reseller. Extremely tight distribution chains designed to prevent a competitor from getting a hold of your product is pretty darn rare. And when it's a monopoly that's already repeatedly demonstrated monopolist behavior, it's even less permissible. So they have a patent monopoly on the hardware, already shown they'll fight in court to protect it (re: Uber), and will prevent anyone from buying that hardware if it's a potential competitor to their service-based business. Their choice to sell the hardware makes it a separate market than their ride-sharing service, and one could argue a violation of antitrust law if they're blocking competitors from one market from buying their product in another.
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    There's no such thing as a "patent monopoly", and there are multiple competitors in this space (4? mentioned in the article). The idea that there's a meaningful monopoly here is strange, to say the least. Unless you're actually trying to argue that "warehouse lidar produced by Google" is a meaningfully different market than "warehouse lidar", which completely contravenes both written law and precedent. Also the right of first sale is trademark/copyright law, not contract law. Companies are absolutely allowed to create non-trademark agreements, and they do all the time. Think software licenses.
    - UncleEntity 8y ago
      > Also the right of first sale is trademark/copyright law, not contract law. And apparently patent law, you can't use your patents to force someone who legally acquired a device to not do something with it. So, if one legally got their hands on one of these things there's not a thing waymo could do to them if they were "misusing" it.
bnt 8y ago
Calling The Verge “independent” is a bit missleading.
- nevir 8y ago
  Why is that?
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  True, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt, since they're being critical of Google here, despite their incredibly cozy relationship with Google. Numerous Google executives have done exclusive interviews particularly with The Verge, all the way up to Sundar Pichai, so there's definitely some question whenever they praise Google if there's a conflict of interest or incentive for them to give Google a positive spin. I assume, of course, you were likely trying to make some sort of "iVerge" claim here, but the reality is, The Verge gives Google incredibly favorable press coverage as well. At the end of the day, The Verge is a business that's in it for clicks, and exclusive interviews and insider access equals clicks. So The Verge will shill for just about any company that can give them scoops, including both Apple and Google. Both companies are notoriously brutal to sites that write critically about them, and The Verge avoids heavily criticizing either in most cases, as to not jeopardize their access.
glenrivard 8y ago
Would expect it means will not sell to competitors. Nothing wrong with that in the US. Are you American?
lern_too_spel 8y ago
The blog post itself says they will sell only to "select partners." The Verge's article doesn't add anything, and it doesn't claim it's illegal.
bryanlarsen 8y ago
It's a safety-critical component. All they have to do to prevent competitors from using it would be to only certify its use in limited contexts.

gbersac 8y ago

There's no information about price. I heard that lidar's price was a massive problem for their mass adoption and the reason why Tesla try not to use them for self-driving cars. If its price would be signinficantly lower than other lidars, it would be a real breakthrough. Any idea about its price ?

smt88 8y ago
I would imagine Waymo wants to sell them to other companies to reach better economies of scale and bring their own prices down. It'd be interesting to hear from someone who knows specifics of LIDAR manufacturing, though.
Fricken 8y ago
Waymo isn't disclosing price. Part of their reason for taking this initiative is to find a market that justifies scaled production of their devices, as a means of driving the costs down. Everyone in the Lidar bubble hopes to someday have Lidar that is both cheap and good, and such a product is likely years away, for Waymo or anyone else. This announcement reads like a 'Plan B' for Waymo's lidar team. Waymo's talk of buying 20k Jaguar Ipaces and 60k Chrysler Pacificas for robotaxi deployment is indefinitely on hold, and if that was playing out the way they wanted it to, then Waymo's lidar production team would have more important things to do than fishing around for a secondary Lidar market to sell their wares to.
- cloudwalking 8y ago
  Can you cite a source for vehicle purchasing on hold?
  - Fricken 8y ago
    I'm not saying they cancelled their puchasing order. When they announced those purchasing orders a year ago Waymo's PR was singing a different tune, they've missed a lot of targets between then and now. It's hard to paint a plausible scenario where they deployed even 10k of those robotaxis over the next few years, let alone all 80,000 of them.

iandanforth 8y ago

Can someone give me some other common examples of will-not-compete clauses in sales agreements? (This post implies they have one.) I'm drawing a blank.

smt88 8y ago
A lot of web APIs, especially for B2B SaaS, come with these. Uber's does, too.

polskibus 8y ago

It's great that Waymo has decided to start selling bits of their tech. That's in contrast to other Alphabet-developed hardware like TPU (for training, not inference). I wonder whether 'for selected partners only' is going to be temporary or permanent restriction.

ucaetano 8y ago
> Now, we are making these sensors available to companies outside of self-driving — beginning with robotics, security, agricultural technology, and more — so they can achieve their own technological breakthroughs. It will likely come with licensing and non-compete agreements.
- polskibus 8y ago
  It would be as bad as lack of right to repair. If it happens , then I hope someone like Intel does the same to them.
kajecounterhack 8y ago
I'm not sure TPU is a good example. That one is already super Google specific and difficult to externalize except through a hosted service. Google's internal infra is pretty complex.
- polskibus 8y ago
  It's not super Google specific if it is supported by tensorflow. Yes there may be some obstacles to using it to in your home pc, but there should be at least a paid way to use it if you want in your own server.
  - kajecounterhack 8y ago
    > It's not super Google specific if it is supported by tensorflow. That's simply not true. If framework X supports <client that connects to complex hosted service Y> then "using it in my home PC" isn't automatically possible.

mtgx 8y ago

I imagine there's some sort of "bait and switch" here where Google gets what it has always wanted and most car makers have refused to give it: access full car data and telemetry.

lnsru 8y ago

Any speculation about specifications of this device? How many points per second does it produce? No info in the article and on Waymo’s page. What it can do more than current lidar from Sick or Teradyne?

kyle_martin1 8y ago
Way more. They say it has a 95 degrees vertical FOV and 360 degrees FOV. The vertical FOV is awesome actually. A Velodyne VLP-16 has roughly 30 degrees FOV. We need the vertical and horizontal angular resolution to make any real judgements though.

ElijahLynn 8y ago

Brainstorm thread: What are some novel ideas outside of self-driving that the Waymo Lidar Sensor could be used for? And what could be done if it goes below $1,000 (e.g. video games)?

lnsru 8y ago
You already have 2 generations of MS Kinect. It can already stream RGB-D images, lidar provides no color information. There is no killer application for cheap lidar, there are many cheap devices covering <10 meter distance range with great resolution and their adoption is still extremely low.
- fudgy73 8y ago
  *technically 3: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kinect-dk/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kinect-dk/
msadowski 8y ago
They say they can record multiple returns per single pulse. This can really useful for forest mapping (e.g. on a drone). For video games maybe but I'd always try to avoid looking at those, even if LiDARs are eye safe it's not fun staring at them.
- ElijahLynn 8y ago
  Wow, detailed forest mapping! What are some things that would be doable with detailed forrest maps?
  - CobrastanJorji 8y ago
    Perhaps mapping tree growth in response to some environmental changes, or detecting illegal logging, or measuring the impact of wildfires, or, maybe if it does a good job of detecting animals, mapping the migrations/populations of endangered, larger mammals? Alternately, a cheap way to produce amazingly accurate video game maps of your neighborhood.

Animats 8y ago

The self-driving industry has not progressed fast enough to get LIDAR prices down. Continental announced a good automotive flash LIDAR several years ago.[1] They're a big auto parts company; they need an order on the scale of typical auto parts to start volume production. The solid-state solutions are potentially cheaper, but involve custom ICs, which need volume to get the price down. (Continental's technology is from Advanced Scientific Concepts, which makes high-end LIDAR units. The Dragon spacecraft uses one for docking. Costs about $100K. So it's not vaporware, like some of their startup competitors.) [1] https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Landing-Pages/CAD/Automated-Driving/GlobalHighlights/3D-Flash-Lidar https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Landing-Pages/C...

choppaface 8y ago
Well there's Livox with a $600 unit: https://www.livoxtech.com/ https://www.livoxtech.com/ Initial reviews[1] on the internet show it looks pretty decent for the price. There are certainly better sensors, but I would argue we have indeed entered the sub-$1,000-lidar-phase of the SDC era. As if Andrej Karpathy needed anything more to worry about. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/UAVmapping/comments/aimnik/livox_mid40_lidar_first_review_with_pictures/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UAVmapping/comments/aimnik/livox_mi...

leesec 8y ago

Seems like a good time to mention Waymo has a valuation of 75 billion dollars and has yet to make any revenue. Maybe they will start to bring in some money!

Jyaif 8y ago
They do have revenue (although the cars have safety drivers).

pavon 8y ago

Interesting that they designed it with 360 degree horizontal field of view when they are using it on the bumper of the car.

synaesthesisx 8y ago

Anyone know if this is a solid-state unit? I've heard Velodyne has a new solid state array in the works, but no idea how it compares to something like this. At CES this year there were quite a few vendors with various flash LIDAR tech.

kyle_martin1 8y ago
It's not solid state because it's moving. Solid state usually uses an IR flash technology. :)

kyle_martin1 8y ago

I work as a lead autonomous vehicle engineer and have designed a sensor suite. Here's a few thoughts: * They say it has a 95 degrees vertical FOV and 360 degrees FOV. The vertical FOV is awesome actually. A Velodyne VLP-16 has roughly 30 degrees FOV. We need the vertical and horizontal angular resolution to make any first-take judgements though. * One overlooked feature I want to point out is that the Minimum Range is 0. Many lidars perform well at far distances but struggle to see objects very close (<1 meter away). This poses a safety issue as someone or something is effectively invisible to the robot if they're too close. Of course you can use cameras to handle this case but this is a big win for the Waymo hardware team! * They're going to be 15k+ (gut estimate) ------------------------------------------------ By the way, if you want to to become an autonomous vehicle engineer I put together a resource guide here: https://becomeautonomous.com https://becomeautonomous.com

sdave 8y ago
Thanks for the excellent resource Kyle!