Well, Waymo is doing it right, and everybody else is nowhere.
The next big jump will be when the next-generation LIDARs come out. All solid state, and much cheaper. Industry analysts say 2020 for that.[1] They can be built now, but nobody is prepared to order enough of them yet. Continental, the big European auto parts company, is probably in the lead. (Quanergy keeps announcing, but try to order what they announced in 2016.)
They also built a second narrowly focused longer range lidar that can be automatically pointed at the ROI of objects visuslly detected beyond the range of velodyne's ~200m.
Advanced LIDAR requires some less-used semiconductor fab technologies, like indium gallium arsenide. So you can't just send an order into a commercial CMOS fab like TMSC. Continental bought Advanced Scientific Concepts, which had semiconductor physics PhDs figuring out how to do this. The devices work fine, but early models were for DoD and space applications (the Dragon spacecraft has one), built by hand, and priced accordingly.
Once there's a market for a few million a year, the price will come way down.
IMHO that's overhyping things. There absolutely are foundries that will give you a compound semiconductor chip back. E.g. a lot of radio chips use compound semiconductors, you don't necessarily need your own foundry :)
Also flash LIDAR range is pretty bad and using super-sensitive photodetector arrays results in intolerable yield issues.
I've seen the Conti ASC promos but they haven't posted the range on the solid state lidar's. I was veeery excited about the tech, but from what I understand it's very hard directing the laser of a high enough intensity to implement this in a usefull way.
About 200m in the older ASC models.[1]
There's a tradeoff between field of view and range, depending on lens option. It's likely that a vehicle would have a pair of forward looking units, a narrow beam long range one and a wide beam short range unit.
Advanced Scientific Concepts has been making good flash LIDAR units for years, price point around $100K. Continental acquired ASC and their team, and is transitioning this from a handmade product made by PhDs in Santa Monica, CA into a volume product made like an German auto part.
I saw the original optical bench prototype back in 2003 when we were preparing for the original DARPA Grand Challenge. They aimed it out a garage door into a sunlit parking lot and took 3D images. But it wasn't portable back then, so we couldn't use it.
According to Wikipedia, Velodyne radars have a range of about 120m. If ASC managed to get 200M that is hella impressive. I did hear that their tech has some gotcha's keeping it from series production but it's not really clear to me what is _really_ happening. I do think if they manage to launch this at an acceptable price range it's going to be a big thing.
About 15 of them are talking about it.[1] About five have demoed.[2]
As far as I can tell, nobody is shipping in volume. There are lots of rotating-scanner devices now, still expensive.
LeddarTech is shipping 1x8 and 1x16 pixel flash LIDARs now.[3] That's too low-rez for self driving, and they plan higher resolutions. Velodyne's big scanner is 64x400 (full circle scan). BrashTech, which sells drones for inspecting towers, bridges, and other hard to get at infrastructure, has Continental's flash LIDAR on drones.
So we're at "expensive niche product", waiting for somebody to order in volume.
It seems to be real; there are reviews, with videos.[1] It's easier at short range; the exotic sensor materials aren't needed. Those things are going to be a big win for small mobile robots.
Software might be a differentiator for a while, but it'll likely get commoditised. Self-driving doesn't involve complex UI with high switching costs and has little network effects / virality. And Google doesn't really have distribution locked down for self-driving cars like Search or Gmail.
The hardware on the other hand might not get commoditised so easily. It might have patent protection. If nothing else, high capital costs will mean monopoly or duopoly with enough profits.
Has anyone tried putting LIDAR in a human-driven car? It seems like a heads-up display with a 3D image of your surroundings would improve safety even for human drivers (plus it would look really cool).
Full disclosure: I work for one of Google's major competitors in this space.
> Well, Waymo is doing it right, and everybody else is nowhere.
... has been said for >5 years and looks ever less true as time passes. Remember when Google was supposed to introduce a finished fully automated driving system in 2017? Google had a very impressive technology demonstrator back in 2012, but they have had endless trouble turning that into a viable product. Turns out "let's just throw ridiculous hardware at the problem" leads to issues when you have to build millions of the thing. Even if there system were perfect already, which it isn't, it is not fit for integration into production vehicles. That's why Google has had very little success trying to sell their system to car manufacturers.
Meanwhile, their competitors are progressing along the "bottom-up" path to full automation quite rapidly. Many basic driving tasks are essentially solved already and will filter down to production vehicles over the next few years. I can't know where exactly Google is right now and obviously I can't state where we are, but I fully expect that the different paths to full automation will converge in a few years. Several companies will have systems that are "good enough" for 90% of common driving use cases. Whether Google's system is at that stage already is unknowable, though their testing seems to indicate that it is not. But if it is, Google are still in a race to "miniaturize" it into a viable product before the competing (already viable) products reach the "good enough" level of performance.
The next big jump will be when the next-generation LIDARs come out. All solid state, and much cheaper. Industry analysts say 2020 for that.[1] They can be built now, but nobody is prepared to order enough of them yet. Continental, the big European auto parts company, is probably in the lead. (Quanergy keeps announcing, but try to order what they announced in 2016.)
[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-and-china-in...