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Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

• small_model 8mo ago
  'MicroVision says its sensor could one day break the $100 barrier'. When an article says one day, read not in the next decade.
  • Fricken 8mo ago
    Around a decade ago the nascent LIDAR industry boomed and dozens of startups emerged out of nowhere all racing to make cheap automotive grade LIDAR, and here we are. Of course MicroVisiom is only claiming their LIDAR to be suitable for advanced driver assist, but ADAS encompasses a wide array of capabilities: basically everything between cruise control and robotaxis, so there's no definition of how much LIDAR you need to do the job, just however much you feel like. Tesla feels like none at all.
• bjrobz 8mo ago
  I saw a Waymo in Seattle, today. If Waymo can get Seattle right, that gives me a lot of confidence that their stack is very capable of difficult road conditions. Note: I have not had the pleasure of riding in one yet, but from what my friend in SJ says, it’s very convenient and confidence-inspiring.
  • geminiboy 8mo ago
    I have had the pleasure of riding a few times in SanFrancisco. The drive was delightful and felt really safe. It handled the SF terrain, traffic and mixed traffic like trams very well. I wouldnt trust a self driving tesla ( or any camera only systems) though!
    • rediguanayum 8mo ago
      I took the Waymo from San Jose airport to home on the peninsula. It took the 101 highway back for the most part, driving very conservatively at 65-55 mph, and in the right most lane. It still has a few quirks though. When there aren't any cars around it will speed up to 65 mph, but at on-ramps, it will slow down to 55 and then speed up once past. It will get stuck behind slow drivers being in the right most lane and patiently follow them a few car length behind them. On the plus side, the lidar stack field of view as shown on the internal display seems to see pretty far down the highway.
    • the_real_cher 8mo ago
      Tesla doesnt have Lidar?
      • aaronbrethorst 8mo ago
        hooboy, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=tesla%20lidar&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
        • the_real_cher 8mo ago
          That's wild!
          • aaronbrethorst 8mo ago
            yeah, it's absolutely a journey :)
      • eptcyka 8mo ago
        No. They don't even have radar, camera is all you need, as per Elon.
        • disillusioned 8mo ago
          Even more fury-inducing, they don't even have ultrasonic parking sensors on cars that have ultrasonic parking sensors. They disabled them to move to a vision-only stack that is no where near as accurate or as good and which categorically cannot tell a difference in ground truth has occurred in its blind spot. But hey, all _people_ need are two cameras, right?
    • small_model 8mo ago
      Why wouldn't you trust a Telsa, millions of people let there Tesla drive them all over USA (not geofences like Waymo) without touching the wheel from parking spot to parking spot everyday. Have you tried it?
      • lccerina 8mo ago
        Maybe because of the multiple investigations Tesla has currently due to crashes, deaths, injuries, etc. all caused by "whoops our cameras were fooled by some glare/fog and accelerated into a truck/pole"
        • small_model 8mo ago
          Those are mainly autopilot which people conflate with FSD, and high percentage are human caused accidents (auto pilot requires full attention and driver is liable).
          • Gigachad 8mo ago
            Why does Tesla ship a feature called "autopilot" which kills you if you use it instead of "FSD"?
            • simondotau 8mo ago
              Autopilot is Tesla’s brand name for adaptive cruise control with lane centering. This is a common feature available on a wide range of vehicles from nearly every major manufacturer, though marketed under different names (e.g., ProPilot, BlueCruise). Drivers can and do misuse adaptive cruise control systems, sometimes with fatal consequences. Memes aside, there is no strong evidence that fatal misuse occurs more frequently by owners of Tesla cars than with comparable systems from other brands. This perception reflects the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, more commonly known as the frequency illusion. Nobody is collecting statistics for other brands, so it’s assumed the phenomenon doesn’t occur. A similar pattern occurred with media coverage of EV fires. Except in this case, good statistics exist which prove the opposite: ICE vehicles catch fire more often than EVs.
  • TulliusCicero 8mo ago
    Seattle probably isn't any harder than SF, other than the occasional weather event where the hills ice over and we get a bunch of funny (and scary) videos.
• jdhendrickson 8mo ago
  @dang .... do these comments seem organic to you? old accounts with almost zero karma going out of their way to use the same verbiage to compliment waymo 18 minutes after an article gets posted? .... dead internet at work.
  • tomhow 8mo ago
    Please don't post like this. If you suspect something, please email us (hn@ycombinator.com) with links to specific comments. The guidelines are clear abut this: Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
  • small_model 8mo ago
    Anytime a Tesla or Elon related article is posted it gets a barrage of negative comments usually FUD like. Any neutral or positive comment gets downvoted heavily. Bit suspicious to say the least, very clear pattern, they are not doing it very well should be a bit more nuanced.
    • tomhow 8mo ago
      There is no evidence of any such organised campaign. The critical comments we see against that company and person are generally from known, established HN users, and align with frequently-expressed sentiments among the general public. And the complaint is just as often made that "anything remotely critical" about that company and person is flagged. If posts about the topic are being downvoted and flagged, it's mostly because that person and company are in the news so frequently that most commentary about them is repetitive, sensationalist and uninteresting, and thus off topic for HN.
      • Barbing 8mo ago
        What a great website. Thanks for the data! And good work
    • 8mo ago
• khafra 8mo ago
  Oh hell yeah, we can finally stop the braindead attempts to make a safe self-driving car with just cameras.
  • throwaway473825 8mo ago
    Is there anyone using only cameras except Tesla?
    • Betelbuddy 8mo ago
      Nope...
    • simondotau 8mo ago
      Xpeng, Wayne, aiMotive to name three. Probably many others, who claim to use LIDAR but don’t actually rely on it. Because LIDAR is perceived as a prerequisite for autonomous safety, admitting to not needing it is a bad PR move — for now.
      • Betelbuddy 8mo ago
        There is a massive technical difference between Vision first but with LiDAR redundancy vs No LiDAR at all that is Tesla approach. Those are not the same architecture. So claiming XPeng, Waymo, or aiMotive validate Tesla is technically misleading. XPeng system is sensor fusion. It is not camera only. Waymo is even clearer. For them LiDAR is not optional. aiMotive has now started to market camera only, but its experimental, no production deployments.
        • simondotau 8mo ago
          Xpeng is abandoning sensor fusion. aiMotive has never bothered with sensor fusion. I never mentioned Waymo; unfortunately the AI gods at Apple auto-corrected me typing Wayve, as in Wayve Technologies Ltd. Tesla FSD is not accurately described as a "no LIDAR at all" approach, if you're attempting to contrast it to other LIDAR-trained systems like aiMotive, Xpeng and Wayve.
    • 8mo ago
• BenoitP 8mo ago
  > laser pulses > phased-array I'm not well versed into RF physics. I had the feeling that light-wave coherency in lasers had to be created at a single source (or amplified as it passes by). That's the first time I hear about phased-array lasers. Can someone knowledgeable chime in on this?
  • iceyest 8mo ago
    A phased array is an antenna composed of multiple smaller antennas within the same plane that can constructively/destructively aim its radio beam within any direction it is facing. I'm no radio engineer but I think it works via an interference pattern being strongest in the direction you want the beam aimed. This is mostly used in radar arrays though I suppose it could work with light too since it is also a wave.
  • rich_sasha 8mo ago
    In principle, as the sibling comment says, you could measure just the phase difference on the receiver end. The trick is that it's much harder for light frequencies than radar. I'm non even sure we can measure the phase etc of a light beam, and if we could, the Nyquist frequency is incredibly high - 2x frequency takes us to PHz frequencies. There might be something cute you can do with interference patterns but no idea about that. We do sort of similar things with astronomic observations.
  • ptero 8mo ago
    Not an expert, but main challenges with laser coherency are present when shaping the output using multiple transmitters. For lidar you transmit a pulse from a single source and receive its reflection at multiple points. Mentioning phased array with lidar almost always means receiving.
  • MayeulC 8mo ago
    The beam is split and re-emitted in multiple points. By controlling the optical length (refractive index, or just the length of the waveguide by using optical junctions) of the path that leads to each emitter, the phase can be adjusted. In practice, this can be done with phase change materials (heat/cool materials to change their index), or micro ring resonators (to divert light from one wave guide to another). The beam then self-interferes, and the resulting interference pattern (constructive/destructive depending on the direction) are used to modulate the beam orientation. You are right that a single source is needed, though I imagine that you can also use a laser source and shine it at another "pumped" material to have it emit more coherent light. I've been thinking about possible use-cases for this technology besides LIDAR,. Point to point laser communication could be an interesting application: satellite-to-satellite communication, or drone-to-drone in high-EMI settings (battlefield with jammers). This would make mounting laser designators on small drones a lot easier. Here you go, free startup ideas ;)
• orliesaurus 8mo ago
  Interesting to see the cost curve drop ... this always changes the market. I have been watching the sensor space for a while. Cheap LIDAR units could open up weird DIY uses and not just cars. ALSO regulatory and mapping integration will matter. I tried to work with public datasets and it's messy. The hardware is only one part! BUT it's exciting to see multiple vendors in the space. Competition might push vendors to refine the software stack as well as the hardware. HOWEVER I'm keeping an eye on how these systems handle edge cases in bad weather. I don't think we have seen enough data yet...
  • michaelt 8mo ago
    > Cheap LIDAR units could open up weird DIY uses and not just cars. Interestingly, there are already some comparatively cheap LIDAR units on the market. In the automotive market, ideally you need a 200m+ range (or whatever the stopping distance of your vehicle is) and you need to operate in bright direct sunlight (good luck making an eye-safe laser that doesn't get washed out by the sun) and you need more than one scanning plane (for when the car goes over bumps). On the other hand, for indoor robotics where a 10m range is enough and there's much less direct sunlight? Your local robotics stockist probably already has something <$400
    • IanCal 8mo ago
      Sounds like the quality isn't all that great but LD06 sensors look like they're about $20 and someone who works on libraries about this suggested the STL27L which seems to be about $160 and here's an outdoor scan from it: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pidar-scan-240901-0647-7997b63a3cb747f99b8f161862318bec https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/pidar-scan-240901-0647-7997b... Not sure if the ld06 is a scanner like this or if it's just a line (like you'd use for a cheaper robot vac).
    • generuso 8mo ago
      Neato from San Diego has developed a $30 (indoor, parallax based) LIDAR about 20 years ago, for their vacuum cleaners [1]. Later, improved units based on the same principle became ubiquitous in Chinese robot vacuums [2]. Such LIDARs, and similarly looking more conventional time-of-flight units are sold for anywhere between $20-$200, depending on the details of the design. [1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22A+Low-Cost+Laser+Distance+Sensor%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22A+Low-Cost+Laser+Dis... [2] https://github.com/kaiaai/awesome-2d-lidars/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/kaiaai/awesome-2d-lidars/blob/main/README...
• zemvpferreira 8mo ago
  The mind salivates at the idea of sub-$100 and soon after sub-$10 Lidar. We could build spatial awareness into damn near everything. It'll be a cambrian explosion of autonomous robots.
  • esskay 8mo ago
    RIP to every single camera in existence if that happens. Lidar is awful with damaging camera lenses.
    • hinoki 8mo ago
      I had to look this up, because I had never heard of it. How could a lens be damaged by infrared lasers? It turns out it’s the sensors that are easily damaged by high powered lidar lasers. https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/keeping-lidars-from-zapping-camera-chips-2650277956 https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/keeping-lidars-from-zapping-ca...
      • shinycode 8mo ago
        There is complains that some Volvo cars damaged iPhone cameras. It’s not even clear if Apple takes those under warranty. We’ve seen car review YouTubers that got their iPhone camera sensors damaged captured (by a second camera) while reviewing
        • mikeyouse 8mo ago
          One such review where Marques shows how it happened to his phone https://youtube.com/shorts/oeHtfMFdzIY?si=cANJDT5BLfdd9ZUT https://youtube.com/shorts/oeHtfMFdzIY?si=cANJDT5BLfdd9ZUT
          • RobotToaster 8mo ago
            One highlight from the video, he says most cameras are fine, it's just iphones that don't have a very good IR filter. Which sounds correct, in my experience most cameras have pretty substantial IR filters that have to be removed if you want to photograph IR. I also wonder if the smaller sensor size on phones contributes, since the energy is being focused onto a smaller spot. Either way, for that to happen he was filming the LIDAR while active, for a decent amount of time, from right next to the car. I assume under normal conditions it wouldn't be running constantly while the vehicle is stationary?
• colechristensen 8mo ago
  can I buy it on digikey yet?
• fragmede 8mo ago
  It might, but comma.ai proves that lidar is red herring, which is further supported by the fact that Waymo are able to drive vision-only if necessary.
  • KaiserPro 8mo ago
    > comma.ai proves that lidar is red herring I mean it doesn't. If you actually look at it comma.ai proves that level two doesn't require lidar. Thats not the same as full speed safe autonomy. whilst it is possible to drive vision only (assuming the right array of cameras (ie not the way tesla have done it) lidar gives you a low latency source of depth that can correct vision mistakes. Its also much less energy intensive to work out if an object is dangerous, and on a collision course. To do that in vision, you need to work out what the object is (ie is it a shadow) then you have to triangulate it. That requires continuous camera calibration, and is all that easy. If you have a depth "prior" ie, yes its real, yes its large and yes its going to collide, its much much more simple to use vision to work out what to do.
    • fragmede 8mo ago
      It's fair to point out that comma.ai is SAE level two system, however it's not geofenced at all, which is an SAE level 5 requirement. But really that brings up the fact that SAE's levels aren't the right ones, merely the ones they chose to define since they're the standards body. A better set of levels are the seven I go into more detail about on my blog. As far as distinguishing shadows on the road, that's what radar is for. Shadows on the road as seen by the vision system don't show up on radar as something the vehicle will run into.
      • imtringued 8mo ago
        Your autonomy scale is pretty arbitrary and encodes assumptions about the underlying technology and environments the vehicle is supposed to implement and operate in. The SAE autonomy scale is about dividing responsibility between the driver and the assistance system. The lowest revel represents full responsibility on the driver and the highest level represents full responsibility on the system. If there is a geofenced transportation system like the Vegas loop and the cars can drive without a human driver, then that is a level 5 system. By the way, geofencing is not an "SAE level 5" requirement. Geofencing is a tool to make it easier to reach requirements by reducing the scope of what full autonomy represents.
• speedgoose 8mo ago
  How could I buy one?
• michaelt 8mo ago
  Interestingly, there have been people in the LIDAR industry predicting costs like this for many years. I heard numbers like $250 per vehicle back in 2012 [1] Of course, ambitious pricing like this is all about economies of scale - sensors that are used in production vehicles are ordered by the million, and that lowers the costs massively. When the huge orders didn't materialise, the economies of scale and low prices didn't materialise either. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161013165833/http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2012/06/google-discloses-costs-of-its-driverless-car-tests/1#.UapgNWRgaBy https://web.archive.org/web/20161013165833/http://content.us...
  • small_model 8mo ago
    Also 'Luminar Technologies, a prominent U.S. lidar manufacturer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025' LIDAR is useful in a small set of scenarios (calibration and validation) but do not bet the farm on it or make it the centre piece of your sensor suite.
    • UltraSane 8mo ago
      Lidar is critical for any autonomous vehicle. It turns out a very accurate 3D point cloud of the environment is very useful for self driving. Crazy, I know.
      • servo_sausage 8mo ago
        Useful but not at all required. Camera + radar is sufficient for driving, and camera+ USS is fine for parking. Radar is just cheaper than the number of cameras and compute, it's also not really a strict requirement. Look at how the current cars fuck up, it's mostly navigation, context understanding, and tight manoeuvres. Lidar gives you very little in these areas
        • UltraSane 8mo ago
          All of the actually WORKING self driving systems use LIDAR. This is not a coincidence.
• NedF 8mo ago
  [dead]
• dnlserrano 8mo ago
  will Musk backtrack on the whole CV enough, that's how humans do it if price becomes this low?
  • joe_mamba 8mo ago
    To be fair, Musk was only parroting what Karpathy was telling him so you should ask him how self driving cars are supposed to work with CV only.
  • guywithahat 8mo ago
    Well he's also argued that just using CV reduces sensor contention and he claims it improves performance and release velocity, which is why they also got rid of radar and ultrasonic sensors. I am doubtful although it'll be interesting to see regardless
• epolanski 8mo ago
  Microvision has been saying that from half a decade, products? Nowhere to be found.
• brador 8mo ago
  Is this Human safe at these volumes? There was a time you could get your feet sized by putting them into an X-ray box at the shoe store. Removed from stores once the harm was known.
  • skandinaff 8mo ago
    Well, the energy levels used in those devices should be miniscule, and the wavelengths used are well studies. The problem with x-rays - was lack of studies on health effects, and regulations on those effects. I think, since that time, we've studies radiation (be it light, rf or other parts of spectrum) much more. There is indeed a possibility that we're overlooking some bio-electromagnetic interaction effects; for instance now there is some evidence that led lights might not be harmless - but again, it's not the they affect biological structures somehow, but the lack of spectral components has some effects. It is an interesting topic to research. But, the lidar "should" be safe
    • brador 8mo ago
      The main damage risk from LIDAR is to retinal rods and cones. You just know some jerk is going to overclock his system and we know some people just don't care about the harm they cause so long as they get a benefit. As a combo that means I'll be wearing protective eyewear outdoors the day this tech comes to the roads.
• thegeek108 8mo ago
  What is this author even doing with these numbers?
• wangzhongwang 8mo ago
  [dead]
• tonetegeatinst 8mo ago
  Radar is extremely expensive, and lifar is just below that. Glad to see someone lowering the cost of this technology, and hope to see lots of engineers using this tech as a result. We might even see a boom in LIDAR tech as a result
  • formerly_proven 8mo ago
    What makes you say radar is extremely expensive? Virtually every car from the last decade has at least one, many have two or more. They’re barely more than a PCB and a radar ASIC.
    • pbmonster 8mo ago
      If you want to compete with LIDAR, you need high resolution 4D (range, velocity, azimuth, and height) RADAR. Those are usually phased arrays with expensive phase sensitive electronics, and behind that a chip that can do a lot of Fourier transforms very quickly. The cheap RADAR devices you're talking about usually only output range and velocity, sometimes for a handful of rather large azimuth slices. That doesn't compete with LIDAR at all.
• keyKeeper 8mo ago
  There are laser measurers sold for a few buck on Temu. Robot vacuums sold for few hundred dollars have Lidars that map out the room in a seconds. Is there any actual technical reason why automobile Lidar be expensive? Just combine visual processing with single point sampler that will feed points of interest and accurate model of the surroundings will be built.
  • qznc 8mo ago
    I know that automotive parts of the standard requirement to withstand 80°C (or 120°C for military use). A robot vacuum working in a living room can probably be made cheaper because it does not have to face as harsh environments? Also, range is probably a factor. In a living room, you probably need something like 20m max. You car should "see" farther.
    • foepys 8mo ago
      Not only that but vibrations play a big part as well, especially on ICE vehicles.
      • keyKeeper 8mo ago
        Vibrations are surely an issue with electromechanical systems but hardly with electronics. There are plenty of cheap electronic accessories for cars and you can observe that those keep functioning for years.
      • whatsupdog 8mo ago
        Please keep politics out of it.
        • GRiMe2D 8mo ago
          ICE = internal combustion engine
    • keyKeeper 8mo ago
      Sure, these are the assumptions but silicon is silicon, copper is copper and solder is solder. They don't use easy melting electronics in vacuums and hardened stuff in cars, the tech is about the same unless it is supposed to work in highly radioactive environment. The plastics are different but car interiors are full of plastics, so its unlikely that the costs of temperature resistant plastics needed for this is more than a cupholder. As for the range, again pretty powerful lasers are sold for sub 10SUD prices on retail. I am sure that there must be higher calibration and precision requirements as the distance increase but is it really order of magnitudes higher? 120 meters laser measurer with 1cm accuracy is 15 Euros on Temu and that thing has an LCD screen and a battery as a handheld device. How much distance do you actually need?
• zelphirkalt 8mo ago
  Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use cameras only. Lidar using cars are going to replace at least the ones that don't make use of this obvious answer to obstacle detection challenges.
  • FrustratedMonky 8mo ago
    It was cost wasn't it? If this lowers Lidar costs, and Tesla has spent all this time refining the camara technology. Now have both. Use both.
  • wasmainiac 8mo ago
    Just say Tesla, why censor yourself.
    • zelphirkalt 8mo ago
      I have a suspicion here on HN. When criticizing big tech, especially Google and FB, at a certain time of the day a specific cohort comes online and downvotes. Suspiciously, that is a time when one could conclude, that now people in the US start working or come online. Either fanboys, employees or an organized group of users trying to silence big tech criticism. I have no proof of course and it might be coincidence, or just difference of mindset between US citizens and Europe citizens. It happened a few times already and to me looks sus. But if they actually read and not just ctrl+f <company name>, then of course not writing the company name, but hinting at it in an obvious way is no more helpful either.
      • throwa356262 8mo ago
        I have seen this happening multiple times, some to fairly reasonable comments with a just tiny negative tone. There is also flagging abuse which effectively kills the comment /post.
      • sergiotapia 8mo ago
        It's been my experience that hn and reddit have a very high overlap in audience these days. The jerrybreakseverything crowd. Anything anti-tesla, anti-grok, is applauded.
• FpUser 8mo ago
  Below is one of the comments poster to original article, reading it makes me think that most of the whole article has been regurgitated by some AI: >"This misleading article contains numerous factual errors regarding automotive lidar. Here are the most glaring: There are multiple manufacturers, including Hesai, that use mechanical means for at least one scan axis and are already sold for a fraction of the "$10k - $20k" price noted by the author. Luminar itself built this class of scanners before going bankrupt. Per Microvision's own website, the Movia-S does not use a phased array and also does not have a range anywhere near 200m. Velodyne and Luminar do not even exist as companies anymore. Both have gone bankrupt and been acquired by competitors."
• 9999_points 8mo ago
  I wonder if this could be adapted to the vtuber market. Saw a vtuber body tracker being marketed at $11k recently.
• bilsbie 8mo ago
  Are we sure these things aren’t damaging our eyes? It’s lasers shooting all over the place right?
  • btreecat 8mo ago
    When designed, built, installed and calibrated correctly, the power and wavelengths used are not considered harmful to humans.
    • pinko 8mo ago
      What are the chances some non-trivial proportion of the millions of cars on the road will not have their LIDAR designed, built, installed or calibrated correctly? I suspect this is going to be a recognized public health issue in a decade or two. (It will likely be an issue well before that, but unrecognized...)
      • MetaWhirledPeas 8mo ago
        There's going to be an expanding market for laser-proof sunglasses.
      • topspin 8mo ago
        There is an incentive to use higher power. Push the edge of safety limits to achieve higher performance from lower cost devices, for example. It occurs to me there is an opportunity here. Passive lidar detectors sampling fleets of vehicles in the real world, measuring compliance and detecting outliers, would be interesting. A well placed, stationary device could sample thousands of vehicles every day. Patterns will emerge among manufacturers. Failure modes will be seen. Cursory queries on this reveal nothing. Apparently, no one is doing this. We're all relying on front end certification and compliance. No thought given to the real world of design flaws, damage, faulty repairs, unanticipated failure modes, etc. Apparently there are lidar jammers. I bet those are rigorously compliant with Class 1 safety regs... No one manufacturing those is ever going to think; "hey, why not a 50W pulse train?"
      • btreecat 8mo ago
• JackFr 8mo ago
  When every car has LIDAR will they all begin to blind each other? (Insert old man rant “Why are everyone’s headlights so gosh darn bright these days?!”)
  • Maxious 8mo ago
    pew pew https://www.techspot.com/news/108045-lidar-great-cars-but-can-permanently-damage-cameras.html https://www.techspot.com/news/108045-lidar-great-cars-but-ca...
  • slicktux 8mo ago
    That might very well be the case…I’m sure the IR beams are encoded uniquely per LIDAR but it might still blind them… good food for thought!
  • TulliusCicero 8mo ago
    There's already cases in SF where a bunch of Waymos are right next to each other, driving around.
• diamondfist25 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• rurban 8mo ago
  What? You get Chinese lidar sensors for 12 EUR for a long time already.
• Zigurd 8mo ago
  Before y'all say that now everyone will be able to get Waymo's sensor suite for hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands, that's the easy part. Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. Waymo also has a support architecture that doesn't depend on real time remote operation, which can't be implemented reliably in almost all cases. You can't be following your supposedly unsupervised cars with a supervisor in a chase car. You can't even be driving remotely. Your driver software has to be able to drive independently in all cases, even those where it needs to ask a human how to proceed. The difference between level two and level three driver assist and level four autonomy is like the difference between suborbital flight and putting a payload in orbit. What looks like a next logical step actually takes 10X or more effort, scale, and testing.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • RockRobotRock 8mo ago
    >Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. That's true, and they have a huge headstart, but I wonder if all these cubesat companies can bring the price down on data enough that others will be able to compete.
    • Zigurd 8mo ago
      Maybe. But Google has been there in a sensor laden car, overhead with an airplane, and buying all the access that is available in satellite imagery, and fusing that together in a continually updated model. Plus real time data from a billion maps and navigation users. I pity the fool going up against that.
      • Ajedi32 8mo ago
        I don't think Waymo is using Street View / satellite data to drive. They have to build an HD map using a special LIDAR-equipped vehicle before deploying in a new area. Maybe their navigation system will be better than the competition due to real-time traffic data from Google Maps users, but I don't think it'll be so much better as to be an unbeatable advantage.
• alkonaut 8mo ago
  The article is a bit muddy on what is hope and what is product. Can we _really_ buy a solid state lidar today? At what cost? When can I have it delivered? The article starts out without saying it but my takeaway at the end is "Not $200" and "Not in the near future"?
• ck2 8mo ago
  BTW what happens when there are hundreds of Lidar signals at one intersection? There's no way a sensor can tell if a signal was from its origin? Guessing any signal should be treated as untrusted until verified but I suspect coders won't be doing that unless it's easy
• aidenn0 8mo ago
  Anyone know what the ballpark total marginal cost to a consumer for increasing the BOM of a car for $1 is?
• torginus 8mo ago
  From the article: > pricing below US $200. That’s less than half of typical prices now, and it’s not even the full extent of the company’s ambition. This means there are sensors available for like $500 or more. At 4 per car, this is still just $2000, which is a very reasonable cost add even for a midrange car. And with price comparisons like this, I'm sure Chinese competitors aren't factored in, I'm sure the Chinese have stuff for cheaper. So Affordable Lidar is not a limitation. Despite that, self-driving doesn't really exist outside of Waymo, which people take to assume that Lidar is their killer advantage, but with other cars having Lidar, I think that might not turn out to be the deciding facotr.
  • bastawhiz 8mo ago
    I'm not sure anyone today really thinks self driving hinges on the hardware. Comma does a surprisingly good job with very minimal hardware (in the form factor of an old Tom Tom!). The advantage is really the device's processing power (cramming enough compute in without making it crazy expensive) and the data that the manufacturer has about the environment and training data to handle edge cases. You can't just buy those things, because the people that have them would be your competitors.
• rbbydotdev 8mo ago
  I never understood why Tesla HAD to get rid of the Lidars. Expensive today sure, but can you imagine all that training data they missed out on? Technology has a way of becoming cheaper and cheaper. It seemed short sighted, even if at a loss, again, the training data. If the pros of having a camera are monumental, then couldn't the video and lidar be combined to be even greater?
  • groos 8mo ago
    Because Tesla Clown-in-Chief asked if humans could drive with just visual input, why can't a Tesla? C-in-C conveniently ignored that, to begin with, humans have binocular vision, and his cars had none. Also conveniently ignored were the facts that human eyes have immense dynamic range, are self-cleaning, and can move to track objects of interest. On top of this, humans also have hearing, which helps gauge danger. Many of these things could be filled in by Lidar but since C-in-C apparently had a revelation from heaven, possibly caused by drugs, lidar had to go.
  • jayd16 8mo ago
    They never used LiDAR. They removed the radar.
• b8 8mo ago
  I still believe in Cameras. I have a comma.ai 3x and it works really well. Just get a thermal camera to deal with fog etc. Waymo has some of the same limitations with cameras that Comma and Tesla does.
  • AnotherGoodName 8mo ago
    I think that supports most people’s viewpoint though. Visible light Cameras alone can ‘work’ but more sensors is of course better. You infrared example for instance. The only reason not to have more sensors of different types is cost (equipment and processing costs). Those costs are coming down fast.
  • bastawhiz 8mo ago
    There's no reason to believe in just cameras. Cameras are easily blinded by glare and have their efficacy drop dramatically when they get dirty. Having inexpensive lidar AND cameras is the best of both worlds. When it comes to safety and comfort, we shouldn't be trying to optimize for cost. If we figure out how to make cameras alone bulletproof in the future, great. But there's not where we're at today.
  • sroussey 8mo ago
    Same limitations as radar and ultrasonic and ladar and vision cameras combined? Even Tesla used to have radar and ultrasonic in their cars until relatively recently. And they use lidar (from Luminar) in their mapping fleet.
• briandw 8mo ago
  The brains (ai models) are more important than the sensors. Cameras are good enough. Lidar doesn’t keep Waymos from driving into an 18” deep puddle, or driving the wrong way down the street. Lidar doesn’t help predict when a pedestrian is going to try to cross the street. Lidar doesn’t give the car the common sense to slow down because a child just ran behind a parked car and will soon be coming out the other side.
• tastyfreeze 8mo ago
  I really wish that companies would just sell their products instead of doing the business relationship 2-step. It is an unnecessary waste of time to sell product. It looks like these sensors have just enough range to be effective for lidar terrain scanning. I would have bought a Movia S right now just to try it out.
  • ronsor 8mo ago
    I hate this as well, but there are valid business reasons: - Setting up infrastructure and support for consumers is expensive and hard to do well, especially if that's not your main industry. - Some products are only economical if mass produced, and that requires large, guaranteed buyers.
  • 1970-01-01 8mo ago
    Isn't LIDAR a high powered laser? How could they just go selling it to consumers like you?
    • tastyfreeze 8mo ago
      It is a Class 1 laser. I can buy a Class 4 laser online that I can start fires with. Laser danger is not the reason.
      • 1970-01-01 8mo ago
        They can constructively interfere in the FSD application though. https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/mqzbx8/comment/guk01ue/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/mqzbx8/com...
• nateb2022 8mo ago
  Low cost, sub $200 automotive grade LIDAR sensors are already available. Cepton Technologies offers Nova [0], Nova-Ultra [1] sensors both at a sub-$100 price point [2]. These feature a 120°(H) x 90°(V) FOV at 50m, with 2.7M points per second sampling. Velodyne introduced Velabit in 2021, for $100. Boasting 100m range and a 60-degree horizontal FoV x 10-degree vertical FoV. The article claims that: > What distinguishes current claims is the explicit focus on sub-$200 pricing tied to production volume rather than future prototypes or limited pilot runs. which is simply not true. Cepton (currently offering) and Velodyne (acquired by Ouster in 2023) have done this for years. [0]: https://www.cepton.com/products/nova [1]: https://www.cepton.com/products/nova-ultra [2]: https://www.cepton.com/announcements/ceptons-nova-lidar-named-as-ces-2022-innovation-awards-honoree [3]: https://lidarmag.com/2020/01/07/velodyne-lidar-introduces-velabit/
  • leptons 8mo ago
    >Cepton Technologies offers Nova [0], Nova-Ultra [1] sensors both at a sub-$100 price point Where? How? I'm only seeing the Nova on ebay for between $4000 and $5000.
    • nateb2022 8mo ago
      Cepton primarily operates B2B, as B2C demand for specialized LIDAR like this is pretty low. Anything you find on eBay is either a leftover dev kit or salvage. This is pretty much the case for MicroVision, Ouster etc.
  • culi 8mo ago
    99% of LiDAR production is just 4 Chinese companies. Yes low-range systems are already at the $150-300 range, but MicroVision is promising to produce this in the Washington. Basically they're saying "we can catch up to China by 2028/2029" ||so please subsidize us||
• rhubarbtree 8mo ago
  Just to be clear, this article is talking about the possibility that this might happen one day. LiDAR remains prohibitively expensive AFAICT.
  • culi 8mo ago
    This is not quite true. It depends what you're talking about. Automotive LiDAR sensor prices typically range from $150–300 today for standard units. Mid-range ADAS systems (Ls+/L3) sensors are about $600-750 and the long-range units used by robo-taxis like Waymos are about $1,500–6,000 or more per sensor https://www.fleetowner.com/technology/article/55316670 https://www.fleetowner.com/technology/article/55316670 The ~$75k per sensor in 2015 refers to the long-range sensors. 99% of production is from 4 Chinese companies: Hesai, RoboSense, Huawei, and Seyond.
    • rhubarbtree 8mo ago
      I think the sensible cost to take is the latest cost in a Waymo model, as that's what "works" for automated driving [1]. I see numbers anywhere between $10K-$30K for that. [1] to a limited extent in a limited area - it's inaccurate to say that Waymo vehicles are fully autonomous.
      • culi 8mo ago
        Sure. Waymo units use 4 or 5 LiDAR units per vehicle depending on which generation you're talking about. So that's $2-7.5k per unit.
• chris_money202 8mo ago
  Cameras alone can handle the vast majority of nominal driving scenarios, but the long tail of safety critical edge cases is where progress slows dramatically. Many of these cases are driven by degraded or ambiguous perception, which is where multi‑modal sensing, such as combining cameras with lidar, can reduce uncertainty. In adverse weather like fog or heavy rain, that reduction in uncertainty can translate directly into safer behavior, such as earlier and more confident emergency braking, even if no single sensor performs perfectly on its own
• neilv 8mo ago
  Laser safety people: how concerned should we be about city streets full of aggressively cost-engineered Lidar emitters?
  • 0_____0 8mo ago
    Basically not. Biggest risk is that a beam steering element stops while the emitters are running. Basically impossible with a phased array emitter like the article discusses. And you'd probably have to be staring into the laser at close range while it was doing that. The laser beams usually aren't tiny points like your laser pointer. Several centimeters across is more typical, especially at typical road distances. Your pupil is very small in comparison. The optical hazard calculations are a very early part of the design of a LIDAR system, and all of this does get considered. Or should anyway. Biggest risks are for people involved in R&D, where beams may be static and very close to personnel.
• niceguy1827 8mo ago
  So tiring to keep hearing this argument "humans only use vision to drive, so why would self driving cars need more?" This argument is inherently anti-progress. It's like saying human had been using sextants to navigate for hundreds of years, why GPS? A more sensible question is, why not?
• ingend88 8mo ago
  Would it be no easier to integrate it into home vaccuums ?
• newman314 8mo ago
  I wonder if Comma.ai will ever be open to incorporating this into openpilot. I always thought the argument that humans are adequate drivers and hence only cameras was not great. Why not actually be better than humans at sensing and driving?
• devolving-dev 8mo ago
  I've always wondered if Tesla's issues with FSD were a sensor problem or an intelligence problem. I think Tesla's claim is that when they look at accident footage, it is clear to a human how the car could have avoided the accident, and thus, if FSD was more intelligent, the accident could have been avoided. Is this reasoning wrong? I personally find it convincing that the problem with self-driving is mostly that the models aren't intelligent enough, and that adding LiDAR wouldn't be enough to achieve the reliability required. But I don't know, I don't really work in that field so maybe engineers who have more experience with self driving might say otherwise.
  • wombat-man 8mo ago
    maybe? But also LiDAR just gives a more complete picture of what is around the car. I think this is supported by how many miles waymo cars run unsupervised vs Tesla. I am skeptical that tesla has this solved but interested in seeing how it goes when as they move to expand their robotaxi service.
  • janalsncm 8mo ago
    Some problems are simply undecideable: if for identical inputs the desired output varies wildly, you simply need more information. There is no algorithm that will help you. Sensors or intelligence, at the end of the day it’s an engineering problem which doesn’t require pure solutions. Sometimes sensors break and cameras get covered in mud. The problem is maintaining an acceptable level of quality at the lowest possible price, and at some point you spend more money on clever algorithms and researchers than a lidar.
  • dbcurtis 8mo ago
    It is easy to underestimate how much one relies on senses other than vision. You hear many kinds of noises that indicate road surface, traffic, etc. You feel road surface imperfections telegraphed through the steering wheel. You feel accelerations in your butt, and conclude loss of traction from response of the accelerator and motion of the vehicle. Secondly, the human eye has much more dynamic range than any camera. And is mounted on an exquisite PTZ platform. Then turning to the model -- you are classifying obstacles and agents at a furious rate, and making predictions about the behavior of the agents. So, in part I agree that the models need work, but the models need to be fed, and IMHO computer vision is not a sufficient sensor feed. Consider an exhaust condensation cloud coming from a vehicle's tail pipe -- it could be opaque to a camera/computer-vision system. Can you model your way out of that? Or is it also useful to do sensor fusion of vision data with radar data (cloud is transparent) and others like lidar, etc. A multi-modal sensor feed is going to simplify the model, which in the end translates into compute load.
• porphyra 8mo ago
  This $200 MicroVision lidar is a short range lidar that produces a really fuzzy point cloud. At best, it can be used for parking. It's unlikely to help self driving cars much at all, much less "reshuffle auto sensor economics".
• flambojones 8mo ago
  I worked in mobile robotics for a defense contractor in the early-mid 2000s and we had a homegrown Lidar (though we always called it ladar) that was large, heavy, and cost $250k to make. I remember a year out of college driving 2 hours to a military base with it in the backseat of my car and being paranoid at every bump I hit. These things seem like a dream.
  • peaceofcake 8mo ago
    What is $200 LiDAR going to mean for the war in Ukraine? I imagine these things will be very useful for drones, if nothing else.
    • nateb2022 8mo ago
      For single-use FPV munitions, a $200 LiDAR probably wouldn't be very useful. For one, that's about half the price of the drone itself, and second, for self-destructing munitions, it's not really necessary to have anything more than video footage to direct it.
• labrador 8mo ago
  Tesla is adding radar and I predict before long it will add LiDAR because that's the only way to get to Level 3, which is a requirement for moving forward in California https://www.fccidlookup.com/report/tesla-new-millimeter-wave-radar-fcc-filing-2aeim-icrlh-2AEIM-ICRLH https://www.fccidlookup.com/report/tesla-new-millimeter-wave...
  • TulliusCicero 8mo ago
    Some internet comments said this was for detecting people in the cabin, not for detecting things outside the car.
    • labrador 8mo ago
      They're not reading the actual FCC document then, which says: Strategy: The move brings Tesla's sensor approach closer to competitors like Ford, GM, and Rivian, who utilize multi-modal systems (cameras plus radar) for their driver-assistance features. Potential: This 'HD radar' could provide critical redundancy and data needed for achieving higher levels of driving automation and improving system performance in all conditions.