[andor436]

Hm, this is not Velodyne's first announcement of a solid state lidar breakthrough.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sens...

Several other companies are working on these (Quanergy, Blackmore) too, but so far they seem to be just press releases. Hopefully we'll see some real ones soon; the current state of the art for wide field lidar are many thousands of dollars and (imo) too fragile for use in production vehicles.

[hwillis]

I take all solid state lidar with a giant grain of salt. Research at universities is still very primitive (beamwidth[1] of 30-40 degrees) and nobody has demonstrated a solid prototype. Quanergy in particular looks very fuzzy. These companies all kind of imply they are using some kind of patch antenna/diode source, which is much more primitive than the nanostructured antennas in academic research. At the same time academic research is 15-20 years away from forming a reasonably collimated laser.

The allure of solid state lidar is intense though. Not needing avalanche diodes gives me a bubbly sensation around my prostate. There is probably no such thing as cheap lidar without solid state.

[1] no laser forms a perfectly straight line, but 30 degrees is more like a floodlight. It makes it very difficult to take measurements by applying a complex filter over everything. Basically all of the data is massively blurred when you get it and has to be deconvolved, which is never perfect. It's very hard to turn a blurry image into a sharp one.

[runeks]

This article doesn't mention a breakthrough in solid state LIDAR design, as article you link to does, but rather that they have an actual product ready-ish:

> Velodyne today announced a solid-state automotive lidar ranging system that the company will demonstrate in a few months, release in test kits later this year, and mass produce at its new megafactory in San Jose, Calif., in 2018. The estimated price per unit is in the hundreds of dollars.

[Animats]

Not much info here from Velodyne. What's the range? Is this a flash or MEMS device? Resolution?

Advanced Scientific Concepts has had good flash LIDAR units for sale for years. They just cost too much. They sold them to DoD and Space-X. Continental, the German auto parts maker (a very big company, not a startup) has purchased the ASC technology and expects to ship in volume in 2020. Here's a Continental prototype mounted on a Mercedes.[1] This is mounted at bumper height and has a 120 degree field of view, and has only 30m range. So this is for city driving or slow driving in tight spots.

Continental says they intend to ship in volume in 2020. Nobody is yet interested in ordering enough units in the kind of volume a major auto parts manufacturer needs.

Google uses a high-mounted LIDAR with longer range as well as the bumper height sensors. This doesn't address that market.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxqFX94zBPI

[analognoise]

We shipped one on the OSIRIS-Rex program to gather materials from an asteroid last year, and will be on the new Boeing crewed capsule as well!

Yeah I'm not impressed with Velodyne's lidars either. The work at Continental is going, quietly, to volume production.

[moondistance]

From the image at the top of the article: "up to 200m range" and "35 degree vertical field of view".

[Animats]

In the video, the Continental rep says "120 degree field of view" and "reaching out as far as thirty meters".[1] This may be the short range model for bumper height applications. ASC has built units with much longer ranges.

For more range, you need bigger collecting optics, which means a bigger unit, or a narrower field of view. The tradeoffs are straightforward.

You also have to spread the laser output over a wider area to keep it eye-safe. The laser eye-safety requirement is on power through a 1/4" hole, corresponding to the pupil size of an eye. This protects people staring directly into the emitter. The power can be greater if the beam is wider. If you devoted the top inch of the windshield to sensors, and spread the laser output over a wide area of windshield, the power could be much higher.

[1] https://youtu.be/pxqFX94zBPI?t=139