[Animats]

The hardware is described, vaguely, at [1]. It's a rotating drum scanner with 16 or 64 lasers. $12,000 for the 64-laser model. $24,000 for the upcoming model with 200m range. Still a long way from a useful auto part.

There are about a dozen companies in this space now. Nobody has the price down yet. Continental, the European auto parts company, is the most likely winner. Quanergy made a lot of noise but didn't ship much.[2] There's a conference on automotive LIDAR this month in Detroit.[3] Many of the exhibitors are major semiconductor packaging companies, with various approaches to putting lots of little LIDAR units in a convenient package at a reasonable price.

[1] https://www.ouster.io/faq/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17755183 [3] http://www.automotivelidar.com/

[deepnotderp]

Why Continental?

Flash lidar seems to be a fundamentally broken concept to me wrt range.

[Animats]

One might think that, except that Advanced Scientific Concepts, which Continental bought, has had it working for a decade.[1] Their units work fine, but are expensive. They're mostly sold to DoD and used for space applications. The Space-X Dragon spacecraft uses one for docking.

There's a tradeoff between field of view and range. Automotive systems will probably include a long-range narrow field of view unit and a shorter range wide field of view unit.

Flash LIDAR has some advantages. No moving parts. Can be fabbed by semiconductor processes. The one big laser is separate from the sensor array, which helps with cooling. Also, you can spread the outgoing beam, which helps with eye safety. (Eye safety involves how much energy is in an eye iris sized, 1/4" or so, cross section of the beam. If the beam is spread out, energy density is lower.)

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7268968/

[analognoise]

ASC is a textbook example of what not to do as a company. I honestly think their technology will be better implemented by someone else in a few years, which is tragic given how much of a head start they had. Eh.

[toomuchtodo]

What do you see as the key challenges in driving down the cost of flash LIDAR?

[dllu]

The light from the flash spreads out with the inverse square law, so you get much less signal compared with collimated laser beams. To compensate for that, you need much higher power. To get more power without blinding people, you need to use 1550 nm. This requires large arrays of exotic gallium arsenide semiconductors, which are expensive.

[deepnotderp]

Also note that in space there's way less background noise.

[foota]

This made me curious, how wide is Earth's shadow the the height the space station is at?

[simcop2387]

I doubt it'd be significantly smaller than the diameter of the earth already. Can't think of how to set it up but the the ISS is only ~250mi above the earth so my guess would be only a couple hundred miles shorter than the earth's diameter at most.

[teraflop]

Almost exactly as wide as the Earth.

[deepnotderp]

What's the power output for the unit in the paper?

[lidarworld]

14-16 W

Velodyne's 64-channel is 60 W