
GM to buy LIDAR sensor-tech firm Strobe - mudil
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-strobe-m-a-gm/gm-to-buy-sensor-tech-firm-strobe-to-boost-self-driving-car-push-idUSKBN1CE1IS
======
mhb
_In a document prepared for a Korean trade delegation to Silicon Valley in
May, and obtained by IEEE Spectrum, Strobe claimed that its prototype lidar
had a range of 300 meters, a processing time of fewer than 45 milliseconds,
and cost less than $100. It also noted that its first product would be
commercially available in the spring of 2018._

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/sel...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self-driving/gm-cruise-snaps-up-solidstate-lidar-pioneer-
strobe-inc)

~~~
was_boring
Is this retail, wholesale or cost to make prices?

As someone who works on their own cars, electric and self-driving cars have me
scared that it will not be possible in the future.

~~~
danblick
IMHO it's fun to think about the economics of autonomous vehicles. For
example, here's a neat article on "second order effects" of electric and
autonomous cars [1]. (examples: Increased use of autonomous cars could mean
less space lost to parking lots in cities. Higher utilization for cars could
mean faster turnover (~3 years/car instead of ~10).)

One thing to think about: autonomous cars might make a big difference for car-
sharing services or trucking, but they're less essential when you're driving
the car yourself and parking in your garage. I think traditional cars will be
around for a while. (Particularly in lower-density areas where there's less
demand for ride-sharing services.) This article [2] suggests regular cars may
be around until 2050 or so:

"According to IHS, a firm that provides automotive forecasts and insights,
sales of autonomous cars, including driver control, will begin by 2025 and
could reach 11.8 million in 2035; sometime after 2050, says IHS, almost all
vehicles will be autonomous."

So your hobby is probably good for another 30 years at least?

[1] [http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-
second...](http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-second-order-
consequences)

[2]
[http://senseable.mit.edu/papers/pdf/20150803_Claudel_Ratti_F...](http://senseable.mit.edu/papers/pdf/20150803_Claudel_Ratti_FullSpeed_McKinsey.pdf)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Can you imagine how much additional livable space is going to be available
across the world if people convert their garages into another room?

Assuming 12 ft by 22 ft (minimum space for a one car garage, rounding down
nation wide to be conservative), that's 264 sq ft. In 2016, there were about
125.82 million households in the United States. That's 33.216 billion sq ft of
additional living space!

They say they're not making more land; I'd argue we're going to be _way_ more
efficient with the land we have in the future.

~~~
maxerickson
You are counting households that live in apartments there.

And lots of garages aren't attached (on this block there are 12 garages with 1
being attached to the house).

Another way to say 30 billion square feet is 15 million to 30 million housing
units. A drop in the bucket of the additional housing that will be needed
globally in the coming decades.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> You are counting households that live in apartments there.

Good call, my mistake.

> Another way to say 30 billion square feet is 15 million to 30 million
> housing units. A drop in the bucket of the additional housing that will be
> needed globally in the coming decades.

I don't think this is the case. Population is on the decline in the
industrialized world. Africa, Indian, and China need a whole lot of housing
though.

[https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-
growth/](https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth/)

~~~
maxerickson
Census predicts that the US population will grow by tens of millions just in
the next 15 years.

But note that I said global to begin with. I think letting people move around
freely is a fine thing.

This link shows a projection Census did in 2012:

[https://www.census.gov/newsroom/cspan/pop_proj/20121214_cspa...](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/cspan/pop_proj/20121214_cspan_popproj.pdf)

They seem to have killed a bunch of urls, but they do tables of future
expected population. The US population is very much expected to exceed 400
million before too long.

------
jakarta
Kyle Vogt blog post on the deal: [https://medium.com/kylevogt/how-were-
solving-the-lidar-probl...](https://medium.com/kylevogt/how-were-solving-the-
lidar-problem-8b4363ff30db)

~~~
Fricken
It's also worth reading Kyle's blog post from last week. Cruise is doing some
stuff that nobody else can do. Not even Waymo:

[https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-
in...](https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in-sf-is-
challenging-but-necessary-1f3f7ccd08db)

GM right now is the most vertically integrated of all the companies making
meaningful progress on Robotaxis. They have a dedicated assembly line set up
building off the Chevy Bolt platform, and intend to have 'thousands' of them
on the road before the end of 2018. They're building their own ride hailing
app, called Cruise anywhere, currently only available to GM employees. They've
got On-star, which provides in-house expertise with connected car and vehicle
diagnostic services. GM's Maven subsidiary offers car sharing services.

But when Robotaxis really proliferate fleet management infrastructure will be
very important. Apple and Waymo have made partnered with Hertz and Avis
respectively, but General Motors can utilize the real estate and expertise of
it's existing network of dealerships, which can save them from a great deal of
capital investment as Robotaxis dissemintate.

Before last December there wasn't a whole lot to be known about Cruise's
progress, but since then it's just been one reason after another to be getting
excited about what they're doing.

~~~
apohn
>...but General Motors can utilize the real estate and expertise of it's
existing network of dealerships, which can save them from a great deal of
capital investment as Robotaxis dissemintate.

I was involved in a project at a major US auto maker where they wanted to
utilize spare capacity at the dealers on something similar to what you are
discussing. In this case, we would pay the dealers to utilize that capacity.

In some states, the dealer networks are large, politically very influential,
and are not inclined to allow anything that will disrupt the status quo of
selling and leasing cars. They absolutely had their hands around the throat of
the auto maker and forced us to go another route just because they saw what we
were trying to do could possibly change their income flow in some small way.

In theory, GM has the infrastructure and is making the right acquisitions. In
practice the vast majority of the company is entrenched in selling and leasing
cars and many people in the company don't have the imagination to see the
world differently. GM has a lot of internal and external politics to overcome
before they are successful with autonomous cars and Robotaxis.

~~~
vvanders
Yeah, additionally dealerships are commonly multi-regional run under different
names so finding competition within a brand can be difficult.

Generally you tend to have to go 150-200mi to get to a different parent
company.

------
Animats
Strobe seems to be using some very advanced physics. Here's a paper on quantum
LIDAR.[1] The semiconductor technology is exotic.[2] The detectors in the
research papers require cooling to superconducting temperatures, but
apparently that can be overcome. It's amazing this technology is making it to
the automotive environment this fast.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.6627.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.6627.pdf)
[2] [http://www.princetonlightwave.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01...](http://www.princetonlightwave.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/2012-Apr-PhotonicsJ_629_Mirin-SP-and-PNR-
Detectors.pdf)

~~~
deepnotderp
Wait what?

I was under the impression this was a frequency modulation LIDAR?

------
syntaxing
Anyone care to explain the technological situation of Cruise? I feel like I
read mix messages all the time about them. Some say that Cruise is just
putting up smoke and mirrors while others make it seem like they're the
closest thing to level 4/5 autonomy compared to anyone else. I'm super curious
where they actually stand in terms of technology.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Heh, that would be inside information would it not? If nothing else, the Waymo
v. Uber lawsuit shows how hotly contested self driving technology is, and
LIDAR technology in particular.

I've built a number of mobile robots over the years, and watched many others
build them as well as part of a robotics club. One truism is that most
robotics problems are pretty easy given ideal sensors and sensors for every
variable :-). When I started building robots I quickly understood that 'sensor
fusion' is more about trying to tease reality out of a very noisy cloud of
data than it is AI or fancy software. I spent a month trying to get a robot to
go precisely straight so that my dead reckoning algorithm would work.

~~~
syntaxing
True, it would be pretty awesome if Cruise had some of their code open sourced
to have a peek at their technology. I was looking at Google's Cartographer and
it's pretty neat to see some of their SLAM work. It would be nice to see
something equivalent from Cruise that shows what they're capable of without
revealing all of their tricks.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I don't disagree, but you did see where Levandowski got _$120 MILLION DOLLAR
BONUS_ from Google right? There are literally billions of dollars of
investment risk riding on the outcome of self driving coding and so nobody in
a 'company' context would be likely to be motivated to share anything at all
about how they were going about it. It would be like asking folks who wrote
lottery software to open source their PRNG implementation so that people could
see how cool their technology was :-). The brief upside of 'coolness' is
massively outweighed by the major downside of 'used this against you and cost
you millions.' right?

------
post_break
I can't wait until LIDAR stuff ends up in junk yards from totaled cars in the
future. I'm sure there will be a bunch of amazing uses for it.

~~~
jamiequint
If autonomous vehicles become a success you'll just be able to buy LIDARs for
super cheap because the market for them will drive prices down significantly.

~~~
freehunter
You'd think so, but there are a lot of things that have a big commercial
market but are basically non-existent in the consumer space unless you're
willing to rip them out of commercial products. As just one example, you can
buy _one_ 7" HDMI touchscreen (just the screen) for $100 shipped [1] or for
the same money you can buy _two_ Amazon Fire tablets with the same size screen
but twice the resolution, plus it has a full mobile SOC with a quad core
processor and a camera and I mean it's a full tablet. Not just the screen. And
it's half the price.

Even if Amazon is losing money on each Fire sold, I can't imagine they're
losing _that_ much. They're getting those screens for a hell of a lot cheaper
than I can, and better quality too. I imagine LCD touchscreens have a far
bigger consumer demand than LIDAR sensors ever will, so the dream of cheap
LIDAR sensors from Sparkfun will forever remain a dream. Grabbing one from a
junk yard will be the better option.

[1]
[https://www.adafruit.com/product/2407](https://www.adafruit.com/product/2407)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/All-New-Tablet-Alexa-Display-
Black/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/All-New-Tablet-Alexa-Display-
Black/dp/B01GEW27DA)

~~~
icebraining
Adafruit is notoriously pricy. Here's one for $54 with free shipping:
[http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-7-Capacitive-Touch-Screen-LCD-
Di...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-7-Capacitive-Touch-Screen-LCD-Display-
IPS-1024x600-HDMI-For-Raspberry-Pi-/381182253906)

But those include a "beefy DVI/HDMI decoder", which the tablet doesn't need,
since it can dump the raw image directly from the graphics chip. You can
probably find a cheaper version if you can do the same.

EDIT: To corroborate my last point, a replacement screen for a Nexus 7 is just
$22 (free shipping), and includes digitizer.

~~~
freehunter
Similarly, I'd imagine a LIDAR sensor built for a Cruise car to be $30
wholesale, $40 if you buy the exact same thing as an aftermarket replacement
part, and $150 if you buy a standalone LIDAR sensor with the parts you need to
actually use it.

Because a replacement Nexus 7 screen isn't going to natively interface with my
Raspberry Pi, and neither will a Cruise LIDAR sensor. A $30 part that needs a
$20 interface isn't any better than a $50 part that includes the interface.

------
rikelmens
This guy seems to be the master mind behind GM's explosive growth in this
area:
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/ostojic/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ostojic/)

~~~
Fricken
Can I ask why you say that? Not that I disbelieve you, but there isn't very
much public information about Sasha Ostojic to go off.

------
vkuruthers
Anyone have any info on how the Strobe Lidar(s) compare to Velodyne systems?

------
deepnotderp
Very interesting and possibly scary for LIDAR startups (e.g. Luminar). If I'm
not mistaken, the Strobe LIDAR is a flash LIDAR?

~~~
deepnotderp
Apparently it's actually frequency modulation lidar

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/sel...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self-driving/gm-cruise-snaps-up-solidstate-lidar-pioneer-
strobe-inc)

------
hayd
Hmmm, so LIDAR isn't as worthless as Uber tried to make out in their Waymo
lawsuit...

------
balsam
I gather that cheap quantum LIDAR[1] is their edge. Anybody care to provide
more details ;)?

[1][https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-quantum-LiDAR](https://www.quora.com/What-
is-a-quantum-LiDAR)

