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by icelancer
1500 days ago
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I work in a parallel industry where capturing motion at high speeds is critical, and in the last two decades, the cost of LIDAR and RADAR has barely come down - and the technical specs haven't gotten much better - while the cost of optical continues to absolutely crash through the floor and technical specs skyrocket. Mobile phones and laptops are the obvious main reason for this. Optical tracking (cameras) have economies of scale that LIDAR and RADAR can't even come close to. LIDAR and RADAR are niche features in a specific set of high priced luxury goods while optical tracking is dominating everything from government/consumer surveillance to camera phones to sports motion capture and many, many more applications. Optical tracking has so much pressure on the field to drive costs down and to increase feature sets (innovate) that RADAR/LIDAR don't. It's going to be this way for quite a long time, so I don't really see the costs for RADAR/LIDAR getting under control anytime soon. EDIT: Optical tracking will be the dominant method of self-driving cars, I'm almost sure of it. The trained datasets have a huge advantage in this regard. Still, it's obvious that LIDAR/RADAR will have additive value down the line. It is just very hard to see how it becomes the primary technology. This is echoed in my field as well as many others - where RADAR dominated, machine learning / software + good enough optical tracking took over at 1-3 magnitudes of cost savings. |
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This doesn't track for me. What was the price of the cheapest Velodyne LiDAR unit 12 years ago, and what is the price of the cheapest today? My not-in-the-industry searching says a Velodyne unit cost $75,000[1][2] 12 years ago. IIRC, estimates of Google's inhouse LiDAR sensor (which is not for sale) was about $10-20,000 per unit - this was about 5 years ago. Currently, Velodyne is selling(?) the Velarray H800[3] solid-state unit that had a $500 price-point target[4][5] during development. How does this square with your assertion that the cost of LiDAR has barely come down?
Edit: I checked, it was precisely 5 years ago and Google claimed[6] that it cut the cost of LiDAR by 90 percent! I think you were wrong to say LiDAR costs have barely come down.
1. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-ouster-lidar-20171...
2. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/the-technology-behind-t...
3.https://velodynelidar.com/products/velarray-h800/
4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2020/11/13/velody...
5. https://www.reuters.com/article/velodyne-lidar-tech/velodyne...
6. https://www.businessinsider.com/googles-waymo-reduces-lidar-...