Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

Before y'all say that now everyone will be able to get Waymo's sensor suite for hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands, that's the easy part.

Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. Waymo also has a support architecture that doesn't depend on real time remote operation, which can't be implemented reliably in almost all cases. You can't be following your supposedly unsupervised cars with a supervisor in a chase car. You can't even be driving remotely. Your driver software has to be able to drive independently in all cases, even those where it needs to ask a human how to proceed.

The difference between level two and level three driver assist and level four autonomy is like the difference between suborbital flight and putting a payload in orbit. What looks like a next logical step actually takes 10X or more effort, scale, and testing.

Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use cameras only. Lidar using cars are going to replace at least the ones that don't make use of this obvious answer to obstacle detection challenges.

The mind salivates at the idea of sub-$100 and soon after sub-$10 Lidar. We could build spatial awareness into damn near everything. It'll be a cambrian explosion of autonomous robots.

The article is a bit muddy on what is hope and what is product. Can we _really_ buy a solid state lidar today? At what cost? When can I have it delivered?

The article starts out without saying it but my takeaway at the end is "Not $200" and "Not in the near future"?

Interestingly, there have been people in the LIDAR industry predicting costs like this for many years. I heard numbers like $250 per vehicle back in 2012 [1]

Of course, ambitious pricing like this is all about economies of scale - sensors that are used in production vehicles are ordered by the million, and that lowers the costs massively. When the huge orders didn't materialise, the economies of scale and low prices didn't materialise either.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161013165833/http://content.us...

'MicroVision says its sensor could one day break the $100 barrier'. When an article says one day, read not in the next decade.

Microvision has been saying that from half a decade, products? Nowhere to be found.

When every car has LIDAR will they all begin to blind each other?

(Insert old man rant “Why are everyone’s headlights so gosh darn bright these days?!”)

> laser pulses

> phased-array

I'm not well versed into RF physics. I had the feeling that light-wave coherency in lasers had to be created at a single source (or amplified as it passes by). That's the first time I hear about phased-array lasers.

Can someone knowledgeable chime in on this?

Interesting to see the cost curve drop ... this always changes the market.

I have been watching the sensor space for a while. Cheap LIDAR units could open up weird DIY uses and not just cars. ALSO regulatory and mapping integration will matter. I tried to work with public datasets and it's messy. The hardware is only one part! BUT it's exciting to see multiple vendors in the space. Competition might push vendors to refine the software stack as well as the hardware. HOWEVER I'm keeping an eye on how these systems handle edge cases in bad weather. I don't think we have seen enough data yet...

There are laser measurers sold for a few buck on Temu. Robot vacuums sold for few hundred dollars have Lidars that map out the room in a seconds.

Is there any actual technical reason why automobile Lidar be expensive? Just combine visual processing with single point sampler that will feed points of interest and accurate model of the surroundings will be built.

Are we sure these things aren’t damaging our eyes? It’s lasers shooting all over the place right?

BTW what happens when there are hundreds of Lidar signals at one intersection?

There's no way a sensor can tell if a signal was from its origin?

Guessing any signal should be treated as untrusted until verified but I suspect coders won't be doing that unless it's easy

@dang .... do these comments seem organic to you? old accounts with almost zero karma going out of their way to use the same verbiage to compliment waymo 18 minutes after an article gets posted? .... dead internet at work.

I wonder if this could be adapted to the vtuber market. Saw a vtuber body tracker being marketed at $11k recently.

Radar is extremely expensive, and lifar is just below that.

Glad to see someone lowering the cost of this technology, and hope to see lots of engineers using this tech as a result.

We might even see a boom in LIDAR tech as a result

What? You get Chinese lidar sensors for 12 EUR for a long time already.

Below is one of the comments poster to original article, reading it makes me think that most of the whole article has been regurgitated by some AI:

>"This misleading article contains numerous factual errors regarding automotive lidar. Here are the most glaring:

There are multiple manufacturers, including Hesai, that use mechanical means for at least one scan axis and are already sold for a fraction of the "$10k - $20k" price noted by the author. Luminar itself built this class of scanners before going bankrupt.

Per Microvision's own website, the Movia-S does not use a phased array and also does not have a range anywhere near 200m.

Velodyne and Luminar do not even exist as companies anymore. Both have gone bankrupt and been acquired by competitors."

Is this Human safe at these volumes? There was a time you could get your feet sized by putting them into an X-ray box at the shoe store. Removed from stores once the harm was known.

What is this author even doing with these numbers?

can I buy it on digikey yet?

How could I buy one?

It might, but comma.ai proves that lidar is red herring, which is further supported by the fact that Waymo are able to drive vision-only if necessary.

I saw a Waymo in Seattle, today. If Waymo can get Seattle right, that gives me a lot of confidence that their stack is very capable of difficult road conditions.

Note: I have not had the pleasure of riding in one yet, but from what my friend in SJ says, it’s very convenient and confidence-inspiring.

will Musk backtrack on the whole CV enough, that's how humans do it if price becomes this low?

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Oh hell yeah, we can finally stop the braindead attempts to make a safe self-driving car with just cameras.