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Thursday, June 18, 2020

LiDAR News: Outsight-Velodyne, Aeye, UCB, Livox

BusinessWire: It appears that Outsight gives up on its own LiDAR hardware and switches over to Velodyne as the companies jointly announce a multi-year partnership agreement.

Velodyne’s lidar sensors enable the 3D Semantic Camera solution to capture 3D data and track people and objects in a way that preserves anonymity and trust. The autonomous system merges lidar data capture with RGB color data with an embedded AI processing unit to create a premises-wide, detailed situational understanding of facilities, such as airports, shopping malls and train stations.

Velodyne’s lidar sensors play an essential role in helping our platform capture, process and understand congested environments so operators can work to increase operational efficiency and security,” said Cedric Hutchings, CEO, Outsight. “The Velodyne lidar sensors allow us to track each individual person and object with centimeter-level precision. They enable our solutions to precisely monitor movements, velocity and interactions between all persons and objects in real time.

AEye publishes "Time of Flight vs. FMCW LiDAR: A Side-by-Side Comparison" whitepaper which is supposed to debunk FMCW companies' claims:


UCB publishes a PhD Thesis on FMCW LiDAR "FMCW Lidar: Scaling to the Chip-Level and Improving Phase-Noise-Limited Performance" by Phillip Sandborn.

"In this dissertation, I present my work in chip-scale integration of optical and electronic components for application in coherent lidar techniques. First, I will summarize the work to integrate a typically bulky FMCW lidar control system onto an optoelectronic chip-stack. The chip-stack consists of an SOI silicon-photonics chip and a standard CMOS chip. The chip was used in an imaging system to generate 3D images with as little as 10um depth precision at standoff distances of 30cm.

Second, I will summarize my work in implementing and analyzing a new post-processing method for FMCW lidar signals, called "multi-synchronous re-sampling" (MK-re-sampling).
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Forbes publishes an interview-based article "The Big Bend Theory And Beyond- Are We There Yet?"

"I interviewed 4 companies that approach solid-state LiDAR in different ways – technically and from a market perspective. They include Quanergy, Lumotive, Draper Labs and Baraja. I would like to thank them for being transparent and sharing the level of detail they have."

Livox extends the range of its Tele-15 automotive LiDAR to 320m:

"Now, objects with low reflectivity have an increased detection range of 60% from 200 meters to 320 meters at 10% reflectivity, and it will also detect objects at 500m with 50% reflectivity, previously requiring 80% reflectivity at that distance. Additionally, Tele-15 now supports a custom firmware, increasing detection range to a maximum of 1000 meters.

The Livox Tele-15 sensor is available for purchase today for $1,499.
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2 comments:

  1. The issue I have with FMCW is the need for coherence. What happens at natural objects where you have sub-surface scattering and diffusive reflection - shouldn't coherence be gone? Also coherence vanishes via dispersion/scattering in the atmosphere.

    ReplyDelete
  2. TOF companies increasingly publish to "debunk" FMCW technology, probably out of fear. Most such publications are highly misleading.

    ReplyDelete

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