
Lumotive Says It Has a Practical Solid-State Lidar - pross356
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sensors/lumotive-says-its-got-a-solidstate-lidar-that-really-works
======
Animats
Continental, the big European auto parts company, has a practical solid state
LIDAR.[1] It's the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR technology, which
works well but cost too much when ASC was making it by hand in Santa Barbara,
CA. What they don't have is a car company ready to buy enough units to make
volume production worthwhile. In the meantime, they're selling a few units to
commercial drone operators.[2]

[1] [https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Passenger-
Cars/...](https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Passenger-Cars/Chassis-
Safety/Advanced-Driver-Assistance-Systems/Lidars/High-Resolution-3D-Flash-
Lidar) [2] [https://brashtech.com/data-capture-and-
fusion](https://brashtech.com/data-capture-and-fusion)

~~~
asteli
If I hadn't seen an Animats comment here, I would have copy pasted it from
your history just to beat you to it.

I checked out of curiosity -- you've got at least 35 posts that directly
reference Continental and their Flash LIDAR based on tech from ASC that
they're going to build in volume eventually. It's a valid analysis, but why
post it _every_ time LIDAR is referenced?

~~~
Animats
I don't have any connection with Continental or ASC. I did see ASC's flash
LIDAR prototype back in 2004 when it was on an optical bench. I thought back
then they had the right idea. It cost too much in small quantities. It's made
in an IC fab, so cost should come down with volume.

Leddar ships a flash LIDAR, but it's 16x1 pixels. Useful for near obstacle
detection, but not enough to create a point cloud. Quanergy seems to have
problems, but they have demoed[1] ASC has a 128x128 pixel unit, expensive but
good. Those are the main flash LIDAR players.

MEMS mirror scanning looked promising. It worked for video projectors. But it
has problems in the automotive environment, apparently.[2]

Liquid crystal beam steering goes back to at least 2004.[3]

The mechanical scanning people have real products, but the ones that can
rapidly collect enough data for a point cloud still cost too much.

So Lumotive isn't that novel. The video on the Lumotive site is a render, not
a demo.[4] If they had a price, a "buy" button, and reviews, now that would be
progress. The vaporware to product ratio in this industry is far too high.

Somebody needs to get this right so we can have vehicle anticollision systems
that profile the ground and don't plow into stationary objects.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13/how-a-
bil...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13/how-a-billion-
dollar-autonomous-vehicle-startup-lost-its-way)

[2] [https://precisionlaserscanning.com/2017/12/mems-mirrors-
vs-p...](https://precisionlaserscanning.com/2017/12/mems-mirrors-vs-polygon-
scanners-for-lidar-in-autonomous-vehicles/)

[3]
[https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.1765211](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.1765211)

[4] [https://www.lumotive.com/](https://www.lumotive.com/)

~~~
kyzyl
I find it odd to state that ASC's lidars work, and just cost too much until
there is sufficient volume, but then turn around and say that the pulsed lidar
groups with working products (that work better than flash lidar, in fact) are
too expensive. Presumably the same applies to them. ASC's focal plane arrays
may be ICs that scale well, but they still need lasers, electronics, housings,
lenses, and more. Just like everyone else.

It also seems odd to state that Lumotive isn't novel. The fact that people
have made SLM based phased array beam steering is hardly germane to the
Lumotive being able to put together a robust, wide aperture, high speed, high
resolution beam steering technology, let alone a complete lidar. There is
simply a lot more to getting this stuff to work than just reading some paper
from 2004 about SLM based steering in the lab.

Also, no lidar OEMs have a "buy" button. You're suggesting that this is
because it's all a scam? I think it's because they don't need or want to sell
to you. They are all out making partnerships with large vendors. I'll grant
that some companies do appear to have vaporware products (most famously
Quanergy's solid state product), but the reason there are many companies
working at it is being there is a need and lots of commercial potential. The
commercial potential in this case comes from the automotive industry, so there
is basically zero incentive to sell at a consumer level. Not even velodyne,
who definitely has real products, sells over the web. Even Ouster, who prides
themselves at being the "available now" high performance lidar company,
doesn't have a "buy" button. Perhaps if you email their sales guys and then
send them $4k they will send you a unit, but it remains that the business
model isn't sustained on individual sales.

Finally, the continental lidar you linked has pretty bad angular resolution
(~1deg) and no stated range. The latter probably being because flash lidar is
at a fundamental disadvantage to scanned lidar. Instead of all the photons
going to one place, they go everywhere. This scales very badly with range, so
they will be power (SNR) limited. The only way to overcome this would be to
have correspondingly more sensitive detectors, which I do not believe is the
case. Even if they gang together many small flash lidars that look at narrow
FOVs, those lidars would probably have to be close to one pixel wide to
compete on SNR while staying eye safe, in which case you end up losing the
"scales on a chip" economics. This might be one reason why Ouster still spins
a pixel wide array rather than strobing many.

------
tzs
> The device can thus see far without having to turn up the brightness. That’s
> important because the sensor works at 905 nanometers, an eye-sensitive
> wavelength the company chose because it works with silicon. You need exotic
> compound semiconductors to make and detect laser light at 1550 nm, a
> wavelength that’s easier on the eyes

905 nm is infrared, outside the visible range for humans. If someone made a
LIDAR at that wavelength, and did "turn up the brightness", what kind of
damage would it do to people? Is the danger increased because it is not
visible, so you don't have a clue that you are looking at something
dangerously bright?

~~~
eganist
Here's a 2017 ieee spectrum piece discussing a competitor's (Luminar) use of
1550nm light for reasons involving eye safety:
[https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/sel...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self-driving/under-the-hood-of-luminars-long-reach-lidar)

I'm still reading it, so I can't tl;dr it quite yet, but the answer in theory
should be in here.

~~~
tzs
That seems to settle it:

> The retina does not respond to the 905-nm infrared light used in current car
> lidars, so we can’t see it. But the eye transmits 905 nm to the retina, so
> it’s subject to the same restrictions as visible light. In fact, it’s even
> more hazardous because the eye cannot automatically turn away from a bright
> source that the retina can’t sense.

The eye is opaque to 1550 nm light, and so even if you are looking right at it
none of it makes it to the retina.

~~~
runin2k1
Which isn't to say that 1550 nm light is safer -- the mode of destruction is
just different, e.g. corneal damage leading to cataracts or surface burns
rather than retinal damage.

~~~
amluto
As I understand it, it’s largely a focusing issue. Close to the visible range,
a distant point source gets focused to a point on the retina. At 1550nm, the
energy is deposited uniformly on the cornea unless the laser is focused to a
tiny spot on the cornea.

edit: I don’t know to what extent this is relevant, but humans can regenerate
the corneal epithelium. Think about all the sand you’ve gotten in your eye as
a kid, and the fact that it probably didn’t accumulate enough damage to blind
you.

------
jahabrewer
> seeded by money [...] from Intellectual Ventures

Hm, what's IV's play here?

~~~
gumby
IV was explicitly founded as a patent troll. I find their processes so
nefarious that I avoid talking to their employees when I run into them at
conferences.

~~~
nardi
I don’t know anything about IV or their business practices, but it sounds like
in this case they are funding research in order to patent useful inventions
that they could then presumably license to manufacturers. Doesn’t sound like
patent trolling.

~~~
closeparen
Patent trolls are the secondary market for IP; whether they fund it pre or
post hoc is not that important.

~~~
tomp
Huh?! Your description basically accuses many universities and VCs for being
patent trolls, as they develop / fund and then licence technology, but don’t
productivise it...

~~~
closeparen
Yeah, basically.

Patent trolling is a red herring - just a form of economic specialization.
Selling your patents to a troll or hiring an attorney to enforce them for you
are just different labels for the same transaction.

It's just that, in software anyway, many more things are patentable than ought
to be. And arguably the whole concept behind patent law has proved unnecessary
necessary in our field - "good" actors deduplicate efforts and share mutually
beneficial IP via the open source community.

Someone in software using the patent system at all is probably acting in bad
faith, or else building a moat to defend themselves from bad-faith actors.

------
femto
A pair of these is just begging to be pointed towards each other and modified
to form a Free Space Optical communications link.

------
trendingtees
Moobs of them really are begging to become directed towards eachother and
changed to produce a completely free room Optical communications connection.

------
fnord77
Please correct me if I am wrong - I am under the impression that camera-based
systems were getting good enough to make lidar moot, at least for self-driving
car applications.

~~~
threeseed
No self driving program is relying entirely on camera based systems otherwise
they would struggle at night. Tesla for example is augmenting it with radar.

I am not an expert but I wouldn't trust a camera only solution purely on the
fact you could never keep it completely clean and therefore you could have the
car mistaking dust for an object.

~~~
Robotbeat
The latter is a problem with LIDAR as well. In any system, you're going to
need sensor fusion to get a robust result.

~~~
jakobegger
With LIDAR you would at least know that there's missing data, and the system
could react accordingly (eg. sound an alert or stop when the road is no longer
detected)

The problem with camera based systems is that they don't know that they are
missing data, and the system just thinks the path is clear...

~~~
spacenick88
Why shouldn't a camera based system be able to do that. Dirt for example won't
easily match up in a stereo vision system and even then dirt on a lense has a
pretty specific look

------
okmokmz
>Belleview, Wash.

Do they mean Bellevue, WA or Belleview, FL?

~~~
pinewurst
The former. It's only the IEEE so they can't be expected to spell or fact
check.

~~~
stcredzero
In the 90's, engineers were more likely to write code without any indenting.
That used to be a thing. Is it still a thing?

~~~
sk0g
If these are the same engineers that have moved on to writing Python because
you can get fairly close to math-y notation, well... Let's just say it can't
be a thing.

