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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 se

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.
    - organsnyder 8y ago
      Was there any timeline given when that order was announced? It could have been over five years, for all we know.
      - Fricken 8y ago
        No they never gave a timeline. Waymo announced they had bought or were going to buy 600 Chrysler Pacificas, in summer 2017, then they later announced plans to buy 2,000 more, and then later announced plans to buy 60,000, but currently they still don't have all of those original 600 in operation. 5 years to get all those vehicles earning money is sounding optimistic to me. The complexity and the number of complications and hangups Waymo has to deal with just keeps piling on.
- cr0sh 8y ago
  An interesting comparison (maybe) is the LIDAR unit that was developed for the Neato XV series robot vacuum cleaners. When it was first announced, and the research paper was published showing how it was built and functioned (essentially a 2D spinning parallax distance measuring system using a laser and linear photosensor array), it was thought that the system would be very cheap to make, and would eventually sell to hobbyists for around $25.00. Unfortunately - that never happened. I don't know what it ultimately cost Neato to make; it was likely inexpensive in quantity, but it was never sold to hobbyists or robotics researchers as a standalone product. Instead, if you wanted one, you had to either purchase and cannibalize one of the robots, or otherwise obtain one as a replacement or "pulled" component. Even then you would spend much more than $25.00 to get one. Eventually they started to show up on Ebay; at one point I was able to purchase the units for around $35.00 at the cheapest; these were "used pulls", some needed new motors, pulleys, and/or drive belts (all parts easily found as well) - so that pushed the price up a bit. Lately, the prices on Ebay have settled to around $75-90.00 for refurbished pulls, or replacement new units. Interestingly, similar units have also appeared on "Chinese clone" vacuum robots, and you can purchase the LIDAR units they use separately on sites like Alibaba, etc. But even there they don't sell for anywhere near $25.00 each. I am not sure where the discrepancy for this device lies; maybe the quantity just isn't there, and honestly $100.00 for a 2D LIDAR (granted, indoor only and very limited range) is fairly inexpensive, but even so I don't see many people using them on their hobbyist devices. Most research robotics continue to use the more expensive SICK and Hokuyo 2D LIDAR (which are time-of-flight based). I think it is more likely that if LIDAR is used, it will be part of a large suite of sensors, and likely 2D only, unless the price of flash depth LIDAR devices plummet. I'm not an expert, but I personally think that computer vision based approaches can work well, especially combined with other sensor systems (LIDAR, RADAR, ultrasonics, etc). NVidia has shown that vision-based approaches can be made to work, and others have done similar work that show the approach to be viable. I'm a bit biased on this because I used a simplified version of NVidia's approach to pilot a simulated vehicle in an online MOOC I was a part of a few years back (I had to simplify the CNN to make the model fit the memory I had in my GPU at the time; I had tried to use a batch training method but wasn't able to get it to work properly before my deadline - even so, the simplified model trained and generalized quite well with the data I gathered).
- ElijahLynn 8y ago
  I left a comment on the article asking for a "safe overestimate". Should at least be able to say it will be under $N.
ucaetano 8y ago
> Now, we are making these sensors available to companies outside of self-driving They are explicitly limiting this to use cases that don't compete with self-driving, so it is likely bound by licensing and non-compete agreements. So don't expect seeing one of these sensors in a competing self-driving vehicle any time soon.
- cr0sh 8y ago
  I think if you wanted to get into the self-driving car arena and were a startup on a budget, and you wanted to play with 3D LIDAR - then the place to hit up for one would be Ebay. Lately I've seen used Velodyne 3D LIDAR units being sold on the site for (compared to new) dirt cheap. Granted, much more expensive than used SICK or Hokuyo 2D sensors - but that would be expected. The fact that they are being sold on Ebay at all is a fairly new and interesting development; the question becomes "where are they coming from"? That is, what is the secondhand source they are being pulled from. In the case of SICK and Hokuyo sensors, it has generally been industry or research. For Velodyne sensors, they were explicitly made for self-driving vehicles (though they've found other markets since). It makes me wonder if one or more the established self-driving vehicle companies are shedding the tech in favor of some other system...?
sharcerer 8y ago
The Techcrunch article ballparked the price below $5000. They had already reduced price by 90% about an year ago and insiders say that further reduction has been achieved since then. ( written in the TC article) https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/06/waymo-to-start-selling-standalone-lidar-sensors/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/06/waymo-to-start-selling-sta...
- ElijahLynn 8y ago
  Thanks, I referenced this quote and TechCrunch article in my comment on the medium article.
  - sharcerer 8y ago
    You're welcome. May I have your article link ?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

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.
  - organsnyder 8y ago
    Was there any timeline given when that order was announced? It could have been over five years, for all we know.
    - Fricken 8y ago
      No they never gave a timeline. Waymo announced they had bought or were going to buy 600 Chrysler Pacificas, in summer 2017, then they later announced plans to buy 2,000 more, and then later announced plans to buy 60,000, but currently they still don't have all of those original 600 in operation. 5 years to get all those vehicles earning money is sounding optimistic to me. The complexity and the number of complications and hangups Waymo has to deal with just keeps piling on.
cr0sh 8y ago
An interesting comparison (maybe) is the LIDAR unit that was developed for the Neato XV series robot vacuum cleaners. When it was first announced, and the research paper was published showing how it was built and functioned (essentially a 2D spinning parallax distance measuring system using a laser and linear photosensor array), it was thought that the system would be very cheap to make, and would eventually sell to hobbyists for around $25.00. Unfortunately - that never happened. I don't know what it ultimately cost Neato to make; it was likely inexpensive in quantity, but it was never sold to hobbyists or robotics researchers as a standalone product. Instead, if you wanted one, you had to either purchase and cannibalize one of the robots, or otherwise obtain one as a replacement or "pulled" component. Even then you would spend much more than $25.00 to get one. Eventually they started to show up on Ebay; at one point I was able to purchase the units for around $35.00 at the cheapest; these were "used pulls", some needed new motors, pulleys, and/or drive belts (all parts easily found as well) - so that pushed the price up a bit. Lately, the prices on Ebay have settled to around $75-90.00 for refurbished pulls, or replacement new units. Interestingly, similar units have also appeared on "Chinese clone" vacuum robots, and you can purchase the LIDAR units they use separately on sites like Alibaba, etc. But even there they don't sell for anywhere near $25.00 each. I am not sure where the discrepancy for this device lies; maybe the quantity just isn't there, and honestly $100.00 for a 2D LIDAR (granted, indoor only and very limited range) is fairly inexpensive, but even so I don't see many people using them on their hobbyist devices. Most research robotics continue to use the more expensive SICK and Hokuyo 2D LIDAR (which are time-of-flight based). I think it is more likely that if LIDAR is used, it will be part of a large suite of sensors, and likely 2D only, unless the price of flash depth LIDAR devices plummet. I'm not an expert, but I personally think that computer vision based approaches can work well, especially combined with other sensor systems (LIDAR, RADAR, ultrasonics, etc). NVidia has shown that vision-based approaches can be made to work, and others have done similar work that show the approach to be viable. I'm a bit biased on this because I used a simplified version of NVidia's approach to pilot a simulated vehicle in an online MOOC I was a part of a few years back (I had to simplify the CNN to make the model fit the memory I had in my GPU at the time; I had tried to use a batch training method but wasn't able to get it to work properly before my deadline - even so, the simplified model trained and generalized quite well with the data I gathered).
ElijahLynn 8y ago
I left a comment on the article asking for a "safe overestimate". Should at least be able to say it will be under $N.

ucaetano 8y ago

> Now, we are making these sensors available to companies outside of self-driving They are explicitly limiting this to use cases that don't compete with self-driving, so it is likely bound by licensing and non-compete agreements. So don't expect seeing one of these sensors in a competing self-driving vehicle any time soon.

cr0sh 8y ago
I think if you wanted to get into the self-driving car arena and were a startup on a budget, and you wanted to play with 3D LIDAR - then the place to hit up for one would be Ebay. Lately I've seen used Velodyne 3D LIDAR units being sold on the site for (compared to new) dirt cheap. Granted, much more expensive than used SICK or Hokuyo 2D sensors - but that would be expected. The fact that they are being sold on Ebay at all is a fairly new and interesting development; the question becomes "where are they coming from"? That is, what is the secondhand source they are being pulled from. In the case of SICK and Hokuyo sensors, it has generally been industry or research. For Velodyne sensors, they were explicitly made for self-driving vehicles (though they've found other markets since). It makes me wonder if one or more the established self-driving vehicle companies are shedding the tech in favor of some other system...?

sharcerer 8y ago

The Techcrunch article ballparked the price below $5000. They had already reduced price by 90% about an year ago and insiders say that further reduction has been achieved since then. ( written in the TC article) https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/06/waymo-to-start-selling-standalone-lidar-sensors/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/06/waymo-to-start-selling-sta...

ElijahLynn 8y ago
Thanks, I referenced this quote and TechCrunch article in my comment on the medium article.
- sharcerer 8y ago
  You're welcome. May I have your article link ?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]