
Velodyne Announces a Solid-State Lidar - sohkamyung
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sensors/velodyne-announces-a-solidstate-lidar
======
andor436
Hm, this is not Velodyne's first announcement of a solid state lidar
breakthrough.

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/sens...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/sensors/velodyne-announces-breakthrough-in-solid-state-
lidar-design)

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.

~~~
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxqFX94zBPI)

~~~
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](https://youtu.be/pxqFX94zBPI?t=139)

------
nukenuke
This is mostly hype until they can actually deliver.

I ordered several of their current lidars 5 months ago and now it looks like
the total delivery time will be about a year after the order. And they're
mostly unresponsive about what is going on.

~~~
mcmoose75
I was at SPAR 3D in Houston a couple weeks ago (trade show for laser scanning/
surveying industry), and there was some rumor-mill type chatter about what the
hell was going on with Velodyne.

Apparently some folks have heard that they're having some sort of supplier
issue that they're not doing a good job of working through/ finding a
replacement for.

------
grondilu
Naïve question : why is Lidar so important for driverless cars? We human drive
cars with only visual and audio information. We don't need lidars. Why
couldn't cars do the same?

~~~
kayoone
Since Tesla is not using Lidar and they have one of the most advanced self-
driving systems, i wonder about this too.

~~~
timr
_" Since Tesla is not using Lidar and they have one of the most advanced self-
driving systems, i wonder about this too."_

Who says? The chattering masses on HN?

Tesla has certainly _deployed_ a lot of assisted driving systems, but then
again, so have a lot of car companies. Lane-keeping and auto-braking are not
new, and to date, that's all Tesla has actually shipped.

People who know better have serious doubts that you can do full autonomy with
only video/radar input under real-world driving conditions (like darkness).
That's why most of their competitors are using LIDAR.

~~~
nojvek
Lidar makes a ton of things easy. Visually extracting 3d world from cameras is
a very hard and computationally intensive problem.

I really hope velodyne delivers. Quanergy seems to have a nice site but seems
vaporware in the sense you can't actually buy it.

A $100 light weight Lidar is truly game changing for robots, self driving cars
and drones.

~~~
cr0sh
> A $100 light weight Lidar is truly game changing for robots, self driving
> cars and drones.

This is probably going to end up like the Oculus Rift; it won't be $100.00 -
it will probably end up north of $500.00, possibly north of $1000.00.

If it were easy, SICK or Hokuyo would have done it already. The fact that
neither have can mean many things, of course, but I bet one of the big ones is
that it isn't easy to pack a 3D LIDAR into a small package and make it robust
and cheap. Both of those companies 2D LIDAR solutions already hit the robust
portion; Hokuyo's offerings hit the small package portion (SICK's 2D systems
are mostly the size of a coffeemaker - I own a couple), but neither company
hits the low price mark.

That could also mean that they have a niche market that's willing to pay those
prices, but given the interest and want for fast 3D LIDAR for self-driving
vehicles and other uses, the fact that they don't have anything out is
telling.

Now doing it all solid-state? Well - there are companies that have these
systems as well (supposedly at least) - called "flash LIDAR"; essentially
firing a laser to "flash" the scene, then using a grid-array of CCD-like high-
speed elements to gather a 3D delay-time between the flash and reception. From
what I've seen, for even the low-resolution modules, they make the former two
companies offerings look dirt-cheap in comparison...

~~~
MertsA
$1000 is still game changing. $1000 is something that's downright cheap to
throw a few of on a car if it allows for a true NHTSA level 4 self driving
car.

------
MrBuddyCasino
Finally! Anyone has a guess as to what those might cost?

(Edit: whoops, embarassing : totally missed the "hundreds of dollars." Sorry!)

------
ralfd
What does "solid state" here mean? If i am not blind the aryicle doesn't
explain that, only that it is cheaper.

~~~
coryrc
By 'lidar' they mean '2d depth imager using lasers', which has historically
been done with a fixed laser and a physically moving galvanometer. Solid state
is to get rid of the moving galvanometer.

~~~
mrfusion
Replacing it with what? It seems like something would have to be moving.

~~~
gallamine
There are many techniques for optical beam steering. It some cases you can use
MEMs devices (like DLPs) or you can apply a voltage across a optically clear
material that changes its properties under the electric field. This is used to
bend the light in certain directions (think of an electrically controllable
prism.)

~~~
ethagknight
MEMs (as in a DLP tv) seems less than an ideal for the abuse a vehicle takes.
Curious if the other option you mention is similar to a cathode ray tube?

~~~
web007
It depends on the implementation, the concept seems fragile but they can be
amazingly resilient. There are a bunch of MEMS accelerometers that support
ranges in the 10s to 100s of Gs.

------
kirillkh
The article mentions the angles (120 horizontal, 35 vertical), but not the
distance covered. This might explain why the interviewee does not believe the
solid-state lidar will replace the current tech.

~~~
sohkamyung
That's answered in the Velodyne press release [1] linked from the article: _"
The new Velarray LiDAR sensor uses Velodyne’s proprietary ASICs (Application
Specific Integrated Circuits) to achieve superior performance metrics in a
small package size of 125mm x 50mm x 55mm that can be embedded into the front,
sides, and corners of vehicles. It provides up to a 120-degree horizontal and
35-degree vertical field-of-view, with a 200-meter range even for low-
reflectivity objects. With an automotive integrity safety level rating of ASIL
B, Velarray will not only ensure safe operation in L4 and L5 autonomous
vehicles but also in ADAS-enabled cars. It has a target price in the hundreds
of dollars when produced in mass volumes."_

[1] [
[http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170419005516/en/Velo...](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170419005516/en/Velodyne-
LiDAR-Announces-%E2%80%9CVelarray%E2%80%9D-LiDAR-Sensor) ]

~~~
kirillkh
Then why do you think will the current technology still be useful, given an
order of magnitude higher price?

~~~
sohkamyung
I'm not the writer of that piece. But my guess would be that automotive
technology tends to change slowly and gets gradually replaced.

Car companies are getting used to reading data from standard Lidar. Getting
them to suddenly dump it for Solid-State Lidar may be a step too fast and they
would rather go through a transition period first (standard + solid-state)
until they are happy with the performance of solid-state lidar.

You are referring to this in the article, right? _“I don’t necessarily believe
that [the solid-state lidar] will obviate or replace the 360-degree units—it
will be a complement,” Marty Neese, chief operating officer of Velodyne, told
IEEE Spectrum earlier this month. “There’s a lot of learning yet to go by
carmakers to incorporate lidar in a thoughtful way.”_

~~~
kashkhan
is it hard to put 3 x 120 degree units to get 360 coverage if the unit is only
55mm wide?

~~~
makomk
It's probably not hard to put the units in, but I imagine combining the data
from them wouldn't be trivial.

~~~
kashkhan
are seams really that big a problem? you could go to 4 and have overlap,
interleaving and soft rollover.

------
samlittlewood
MIT/DARPA also have a combined solid state steerable beam transmitter and
sensor using phased arrays:

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-
talk/semiconductors/optoelectr...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-
talk/semiconductors/optoelectronics/mit-lidar-on-a-chip)

~~~
deepnotderp
The MIT lidar has really bad resolution and range iirc

------
phreeza
Does anyone know if this or any lidars used for self-driving cars is capable
of doing Doppler lidar?

------
ec109685
Is lidar still necessary if computer vision advances far enough? We drive just
fine without radar.

~~~
aedron
Human eyes have depth perception, a camera doesn't.

~~~
stereo
Stereopsis and stereoblindness is actually a fascinating topic. Some humans
don’t have it, and still manage to drive, ride bicycles, or fly planes.

 _The Mind 's Eye_ by Oliver Sacks has an interesting chapter on a woman who
managed to develop stereovision in her late 40s through vision therapy.

~~~
adrianN
Humans have a huge amount of "common sense" knowledge that makes object
recognition a lot easier, even without 3D information.

------
deepnotderp
Luminar has announced an interesting lidar as well, but no word on how the
cost will come down since it's a 1500nm lidar, requiring indium gallium
arsenide and other expensive and exotic metals.

~~~
cjhanks
I would suspect any solid state lidar design at this point would be GaN
(Galium Nitride) unless somebody has made a very secret breakthrough.

~~~
deepnotderp
The current generation of solid state lidar uses silicon, because of the
different wavelength.

------
atomical
Is there any chance Lidar could be used in consumer drones in the future?

~~~
blhack
Absolutely yes there is. Even the single point laser rangefinders like what
are linked in the top comment here now are useful for consumer drones.

The hack people used to do (maybe still do?) was to combine a laser pointer
and a webcam, and infer the distance based on where in the Y axis the laser
appeared in the image that the webcam received.

This, which is many points in many directions, is much, much better, and it
sounds like it will be cheap (at least much cheaper than these devices have
been).

~~~
ThatGeoGuy
One counter objection: LiDAR on drone will be a whole lot less useful if they
all 1) collect the same frequency of EM, and 2) have any way of picking up
scattered signals from other drones (because it was pointed at other drones,
or from scattered reflections).

Right now there's not much in the way of LiDAR on anything, but once there is,
we will need to find ways to stop other active sensors from interfering with
our own.

------
blhack
I wonder if we're going to start seeing 3D barcodes that robots use to read
each other's ID and relative orientation.

~~~
fudged71
A normal 2D QR code would give you orientation, see all the computer vision AR
examples. What would 3D add to this?

~~~
blhack
Well you see a 3D one has more Ds in it, so more Ds = more better?

/s

Totally not my field at all, was just daydreaming a bit. Thanks for the info.

------
kylehotchkiss
Velodyne hopes to win the new phase of this game by being first to market.
“The first mover sets the standard,” Neese said. “Software is 60 percent of
the effort, so if you show up [later] with a new piece of hardware, it may not
fit in.”

Garmin has one on the market for $150
[https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14032?gclid=CIzZ86-fs9MCFQ...](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14032?gclid=CIzZ86-fs9MCFQ-
HswodxFsLSA)

~~~
pdehaan
That thing is basically just a laser range finder, it doesn't produce a 2D
"image" of distances (unless you pair it with something to spin it around, at
which point you just have a bad version of existing lidars).

------
JumpCrisscross
Anyone know what the deal is with Quanergy [1]?

[1] [http://quanergy.com](http://quanergy.com)

~~~
sohkamyung
I'm not sure what you mean by "what the deal is with Qaunergy". Does this
article [1] answer your query?

[1] "Quanergy Announces $250 Solid-State LIDAR for Cars, Robots, and More"
(Jan 2016) [ [http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/sens...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/sensors/quanergy-solid-state-lidar) ]

~~~
JumpCrisscross
How does this news bode for Quanergy?

~~~
matheweis
Quanergy gave me an early quote on a dev kit last year that was an order of
magnitude higher than that. So unless they've reached that price point from
their press release, probably not good...

------
seandavidfisher
Would these be able to be used on drones?

~~~
tyingq
It mentions _" The Velodyne package measures 125 millimeters by 50 mm by 55
mm"_, so pretty small.

But, as I understand it, to do something useful with that, you need to be
pulling in a lot of data in real time and processing it. So it may not be the
Lidar unit itself that's the weight constraint.

