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Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar
- jahabrewer 8y ago> seeded by money [...] from Intellectual Ventures Hm, what's IV's play here?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoCornering the easy part of vehicle autonomy. Capture the sensor profit, make everyone else continue the hard ML slog. “Sell shovels.”
- Pharmakon 8y agoNot just that, but even if it turns out that slog is decades long, those miners will still need those shovels. It’s brilliant, because barring a sudden implosion of SDVA research, this is a guaranteed income stream independent of the success of SDV tech.
- gumby 8y agoIV was explicitly founded as a patent troll. I find their processes so nefarious that I avoid talking to their employees when I run into them at conferences.
- nardi 8y agoI don’t know anything about IV or their business practices, but it sounds like in this case they are funding research in order to patent useful inventions that they could then presumably license to manufacturers. Doesn’t sound like patent trolling.
- greglindahl 8y agoIV always had a few things like this, google mosquito laser. It always seemed like they wanted enough that a few people wouldn't think they're trolls, but they're trolls.
- closeparen 8y agoPatent trolls are the secondary market for IP; whether they fund it pre or post hoc is not that important.
- tomp 8y agoHuh?! Your description basically accuses many universities and VCs for being patent trolls, as they develop / fund and then licence technology, but don’t productivise it...
- closeparen 8y agoYeah, basically. Patent trolling is a red herring - just a form of economic specialization. Selling your patents to a troll or hiring an attorney to enforce them for you are just different labels for the same transaction. It's just that, in software anyway, many more things are patentable than ought to be. And arguably the whole concept behind patent law has proved unnecessary necessary in our field - "good" actors deduplicate efforts and share mutually beneficial IP via the open source community. Someone in software using the patent system at all is probably acting in bad faith, or else building a moat to defend themselves from bad-faith actors.
- cwkoss 8y agoBlind the public with lasers, fix with the patented blindness treatment
- okmokmz 8y ago>Belleview, Wash. Do they mean Bellevue, WA or Belleview, FL?
- pinewurst 8y agoThe former. It's only the IEEE so they can't be expected to spell or fact check.
- stcredzero 8y agoIn the 90's, engineers were more likely to write code without any indenting. That used to be a thing. Is it still a thing?
- sk0g 8y agoIf these are the same engineers that have moved on to writing Python because you can get fairly close to math-y notation, well... Let's just say it can't be a thing.
- pinewurst 8y agoThey've now corrected it to "Bellevue, WA".
- Animats 8y agoContinental, the big European auto parts company, has a practical solid state LIDAR.[1] It's the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR technology, which works well but cost too much when ASC was making it by hand in Santa Barbara, CA. What they don't have is a car company ready to buy enough units to make volume production worthwhile. In the meantime, they're selling a few units to commercial drone operators.[2] [1] https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Passenger-Cars/Chassis-Safety/Advanced-Driver-Assistance-Systems/Lidars/High-Resolution-3D-Flash-Lidar https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Passenger-Cars/... [2] https://brashtech.com/data-capture-and-fusion https://brashtech.com/data-capture-and-fusion
- forgotmysn 8y agoI can't speak to profitability of competitors like velodyne and their existing lidar tech but isn't it possible that the risk of waiting for sales volume to reach a certain threshold, thereby creating opportunities for other companies to bring their tech up to the same standard, outweighs the risk of selling the units below cost to capture marketshare in the short term?
- Animats 8y agoIf more of these companies had real products, I'd expect them to at least be selling development kits. There are lots of industrial applications at the $1000 price point.
- forgotmysn 8y agothats true, but not really the point im making. you're right, any real competitor would at least be sending out dev kits if they were road ready. i guess what im saying is that every day that continental delays is a day closer those companies get to having a product thats dev-kit ready, and thus a day closer to bleeding market share to them
- aidenn0 8y agoResolution of the one listed at Conti is about 9x lower than what lumotive is claiming, but at about double the sampling rate; though flash acquisition has advantages versus scanning acquisition.
- tzs 8y ago> The device can thus see far without having to turn up the brightness. That’s important because the sensor works at 905 nanometers, an eye-sensitive wavelength the company chose because it works with silicon. You need exotic compound semiconductors to make and detect laser light at 1550 nm, a wavelength that’s easier on the eyes 905 nm is infrared, outside the visible range for humans. If someone made a LIDAR at that wavelength, and did "turn up the brightness", what kind of damage would it do to people? Is the danger increased because it is not visible, so you don't have a clue that you are looking at something dangerously bright?
- runin2k1 8y agoTypically you select a class of laser safe for the environment it will be used in -- class 1 is typical of LIDAR systems for this reason which poses no eye damage risk.
- joshvm 8y agoThe lasers in these things are often not class 1, but the whole system is. Perhaps it's fairer to say that laser classification is not just about the power of the laser, it's about how it's used and under what conditions. Class 1 basically means that it's safe under normal operation. You can look at the certifications for scanning stations (e.g. Faro put theirs online) and they usually get round it by specifying that the system is spinning, so you don't get hit with a laser that often, and that you're standing far enough away that the divergence is large. If you somehow fixed the laser and stared into it, it would probably hurt. See for example: https://knowledge.faro.com/Hardware/3D_Scanners/Focus/Laser_Class_and_Power_Output_Documentation_for_the_Focus_M70_and_S70-S150-S350 https://knowledge.faro.com/Hardware/3D_Scanners/Focus/Laser_... according to the test report, if the mirror fails, you would hit dangerous levels of energy deposited within 0.2s and they recommend that the laser must be turned off within 100ms to avoid risk of eye damage.
- eganist 8y agoHere's a 2017 ieee spectrum piece discussing a competitor's (Luminar) use of 1550nm light for reasons involving eye safety: https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/under-the-hood-of-luminars-long-reach-lidar https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel... I'm still reading it, so I can't tl;dr it quite yet, but the answer in theory should be in here.
- fnord77 8y agoPlease correct me if I am wrong - I am under the impression that camera-based systems were getting good enough to make lidar moot, at least for self-driving car applications.
- ndiscussion 8y agoAssuming this comment is in good faith - I have so far only seen Tesla make that claim. And they are also the only ones trying to do self driving without LIDAR. Disclaimer: If I was a betting man, I'd short the hell out of TSLA.
- spacenick88 8y agoThey're definitely not the only ones, saw a presentation on a University team working on this just yesterday. After all, vision is the only system for which we know that it can be used to drive a vehicle as that's what we have been using all along. Also Tesla's do also have radar to detect the most important obstacles in front.
- threeseed 8y agoNo self driving program is relying entirely on camera based systems otherwise they would struggle at night. Tesla for example is augmenting it with radar. I am not an expert but I wouldn't trust a camera only solution purely on the fact you could never keep it completely clean and therefore you could have the car mistaking dust for an object.
- Robotbeat 8y agoThe latter is a problem with LIDAR as well. In any system, you're going to need sensor fusion to get a robust result.
- jakobegger 8y agoWith LIDAR you would at least know that there's missing data, and the system could react accordingly (eg. sound an alert or stop when the road is no longer detected) The problem with camera based systems is that they don't know that they are missing data, and the system just thinks the path is clear...
- femto 8y agoA pair of these is just begging to be pointed towards each other and modified to form a Free Space Optical communications link.
- trendingtees 8y agoMoobs of them really are begging to become directed towards eachother and changed to produce a completely free room Optical communications connection.