At the same time, two startup companies are working on a vehicle-mounted lidar system that costs $100. They all said they will release products in 2018. Innoviz of Israel promised that its “high-definition solid-state lidar” will have higher accuracy and a larger field of view than similar products in the existing market. Innoluce of the Netherlands uses a micro-electromechanical mirror system to scan codes and manipulate laser pointer beams instead of the original solid-state solution. Its engineers claim that this solution will surpass the optical phased array solution in range and accuracy.
The most exciting recent development in the field of lidar technology comes from MIT. Funded by the “Electronic-Photonic Heterogeneous Integration” (E-PHI) project under the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), MIT researchers have successfully used silicon photonics to integrate a functional lidar The system is integrated into a 0.5*6 mm chip, which can be assembled into commercial-grade CMOS. This prototype can only detect a range of a few meters at present, but MIT has a clear research and development roadmap, and the goal is to reach a detection range of 100 meters and control the cost of a single chip within $10.
The market for low-cost, small-size solid-state lidar systems is huge. In August, Quanergy completed a US$90 million financing with a valuation of US$1.59 billion. At the same time, Ford and Chinese search giant Baidu jointly invested $150 million in Velodyne. The goal of these investments is to produce automotive laser sensors that cost less than $100 in the next few years.
At this stage, many companies start with low-cost routes that do not include lidar on autonomous driving routes, but lidar can play an equally significant role in L4 and L5 autonomous driving.
Although the automotive industry currently plays the largest market role for low-cost lidar, the low-cost, small-sized green laser pointer radar sensor will benefit more industries in the future. Integrated in the mobile phone, it can make the mobile phone have better precision gesture recognition; integrated on the robot’s fingers, the robot can better recognize and operate objects; it can also provide data so that the unmanned aerial vehicle can avoid obstacles and safely Complete tasks such as parcel delivery.