
Waymo: Bringing 3D perimeter Lidar to partners - Fricken
https://medium.com/waymo/bringing-3d-perimeter-lidar-to-partners-6beaa7d3dcc2
======
kyle_martin1
I work as a lead autonomous vehicle engineer and have designed a sensor suite.

Here's a few thoughts:

* They say it has a 95 degrees vertical FOV and 360 degrees FOV. The vertical FOV is awesome actually. A Velodyne VLP-16 has roughly 30 degrees FOV. We need the vertical and horizontal angular resolution to make any first-take judgements though.

* One overlooked feature I want to point out is that the Minimum Range is 0. Many lidars perform well at far distances but struggle to see objects very close (<1 meter away). This poses a safety issue as someone or something is effectively invisible to the robot if they're too close. Of course you can use cameras to handle this case but this is a big win for the Waymo hardware team!

* They're going to be 15k+ (gut estimate)

\------------------------------------------------

By the way, if you want to to become an autonomous vehicle engineer I put
together a resource guide here:
[https://becomeautonomous.com](https://becomeautonomous.com)

~~~
sdave
Thanks for the excellent resource Kyle!

------
Animats
The self-driving industry has not progressed fast enough to get LIDAR prices
down. Continental announced a good automotive flash LIDAR several years
ago.[1] They're a big auto parts company; they need an order on the scale of
typical auto parts to start volume production. The solid-state solutions are
potentially cheaper, but involve custom ICs, which need volume to get the
price down. (Continental's technology is from Advanced Scientific Concepts,
which makes high-end LIDAR units. The Dragon spacecraft uses one for docking.
Costs about $100K. So it's not vaporware, like some of their startup
competitors.)

[1] [https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Landing-
Pages/C...](https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Landing-
Pages/CAD/Automated-Driving/GlobalHighlights/3D-Flash-Lidar)

~~~
choppaface
Well there's Livox with a $600 unit:
[https://www.livoxtech.com/](https://www.livoxtech.com/) Initial reviews[1] on
the internet show it looks pretty decent for the price. There are certainly
better sensors, but I would argue we have indeed entered the sub-$1,000-lidar-
phase of the SDC era. As if Andrej Karpathy needed anything more to worry
about.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/UAVmapping/comments/aimnik/livox_mi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/UAVmapping/comments/aimnik/livox_mid40_lidar_first_review_with_pictures/)

------
gbersac
There's no information about price. I heard that lidar's price was a massive
problem for their mass adoption and the reason why Tesla try not to use them
for self-driving cars. If its price would be signinficantly lower than other
lidars, it would be a real breakthrough.

Any idea about its price ?

~~~
Fricken
Waymo isn't disclosing price. Part of their reason for taking this initiative
is to find a market that justifies scaled production of their devices, as a
means of driving the costs down. Everyone in the Lidar bubble hopes to someday
have Lidar that is both cheap and good, and such a product is likely years
away, for Waymo or anyone else.

This announcement reads like a 'Plan B' for Waymo's lidar team. Waymo's talk
of buying 20k Jaguar Ipaces and 60k Chrysler Pacificas for robotaxi deployment
is indefinitely on hold, and if that was playing out the way they wanted it
to, then Waymo's lidar production team would have more important things to do
than fishing around for a secondary Lidar market to sell their wares to.

~~~
cloudwalking
Can you cite a source for vehicle purchasing on hold?

~~~
Fricken
I'm not saying they cancelled their puchasing order. When they announced those
purchasing orders a year ago Waymo's PR was singing a different tune, they've
missed a lot of targets between then and now. It's hard to paint a plausible
scenario where they deployed even 10k of those robotaxis over the next few
years, let alone all 80,000 of them.

~~~
organsnyder
Was there any timeline given when that order was announced? It could have been
over five years, for all we know.

~~~
Fricken
No they never gave a timeline. Waymo announced they had bought or were going
to buy 600 Chrysler Pacificas, in summer 2017, then they later announced plans
to buy 2,000 more, and then later announced plans to buy 60,000, but currently
they still don't have all of those original 600 in operation. 5 years to get
all those vehicles earning money is sounding optimistic to me. The complexity
and the number of complications and hangups Waymo has to deal with just keeps
piling on.

------
ElijahLynn
Brainstorm thread: What are some novel ideas outside of self-driving that the
Waymo Lidar Sensor could be used for? And what could be done if it goes below
$1,000 (e.g. video games)?

~~~
dzhiurgis
Automated solar calculator. Point to a roof, get a 3D model and use some model
to estimate how much of roof you can cover with panels.

Guesstimate the build cost + total solar input per year. Get instant payback
number.

Use LIDAR to establish some sort of canonical clothes size format? Not just S,
M, L, XL that only works for your region. Maybe you don't even need LIDAR, but
I'd love personalised clothing.

If it's cheaper than thermal cameras - perhaps some use for lifeguards,
especially in night?

~~~
esc861
Google has already built a great solar calculator using satellite imagery, at
[https://www.google.com/get/sunroof](https://www.google.com/get/sunroof)

~~~
puzzle
Technically, it's not satellite, but aerial imagery from multiple angles.
Geometry is reconstructed with pose estimation and SfM (the open source Ceres
solver originated from this and other work).

------
polskibus
It's great that Waymo has decided to start selling bits of their tech. That's
in contrast to other Alphabet-developed hardware like TPU (for training, not
inference). I wonder whether 'for selected partners only' is going to be
temporary or permanent restriction.

~~~
ucaetano
> Now, we are making these sensors available to companies outside of self-
> driving — beginning with robotics, security, agricultural technology, and
> more — so they can achieve their own technological breakthroughs.

It will likely come with licensing and non-compete agreements.

~~~
polskibus
It would be as bad as lack of right to repair. If it happens , then I hope
someone like Intel does the same to them.

------
iandanforth
Can someone give me some other common examples of will-not-compete clauses in
sales agreements? (This post implies they have one.) I'm drawing a blank.

~~~
smt88
A lot of web APIs, especially for B2B SaaS, come with these. Uber's does, too.

------
synaesthesisx
Anyone know if this is a solid-state unit?

I've heard Velodyne has a new solid state array in the works, but no idea how
it compares to something like this. At CES this year there were quite a few
vendors with various flash LIDAR tech.

~~~
kyle_martin1
It's not solid state because it's moving. Solid state usually uses an IR flash
technology. :)

------
lnsru
Any speculation about specifications of this device? How many points per
second does it produce? No info in the article and on Waymo’s page. What it
can do more than current lidar from Sick or Teradyne?

~~~
kyle_martin1
Way more. They say it has a 95 degrees vertical FOV and 360 degrees FOV. The
vertical FOV is awesome actually.

A Velodyne VLP-16 has roughly 30 degrees FOV. We need the vertical and
horizontal angular resolution to make any real judgements though.

------
pavon
Interesting that they designed it with 360 degree horizontal field of view
when they are using it on the bumper of the car.

------
leesec
Seems like a good time to mention Waymo has a valuation of 75 billion dollars
and has yet to make any revenue. Maybe they will start to bring in some money!

~~~
Jyaif
They do have revenue (although the cars have safety drivers).

------
mtgx
I imagine there's some sort of "bait and switch" here where Google gets what
it has always wanted and most car makers have refused to give it: access full
car data and telemetry.

------
ocdtrekkie
This sounds much more like illegal antitrust behavior as reported by
independent media: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18252561/waymo-sell-
lidar-...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18252561/waymo-sell-lidar-laser-
sensor-av-customer-robot-taxi-competition)

"Select partners" can mean "those who won't compete with us".

~~~
bnt
Calling The Verge “independent” is a bit missleading.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
True, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt, since they're being critical of
Google here, despite their incredibly cozy relationship with Google. Numerous
Google executives have done exclusive interviews particularly with The Verge,
all the way up to Sundar Pichai, so there's definitely some question whenever
they praise Google if there's a conflict of interest or incentive for them to
give Google a positive spin.

I assume, of course, you were likely trying to make some sort of "iVerge"
claim here, but the reality is, The Verge gives Google incredibly favorable
press coverage as well. At the end of the day, The Verge is a business that's
in it for clicks, and exclusive interviews and insider access equals clicks.
So The Verge will shill for just about any company that can give them scoops,
including both Apple _and_ Google. Both companies are notoriously brutal to
sites that write critically about them, and The Verge avoids heavily
criticizing either in most cases, as to not jeopardize their access.

