I don't have any connection with Continental or ASC. I did see ASC's flash LIDAR prototype back in 2004 when it was on an optical bench. I thought back then they had the right idea. It cost too much in small quantities. It's made in an IC fab, so cost should come down with volume.
Leddar ships a flash LIDAR, but it's 16x1 pixels. Useful for near obstacle detection, but not enough to create a point cloud. Quanergy seems to have problems, but they have demoed[1] ASC has a 128x128 pixel unit, expensive but good. Those are the main flash LIDAR players.
MEMS mirror scanning looked promising. It worked for video projectors. But it has problems in the automotive environment, apparently.[2]
Liquid crystal beam steering goes back to at least 2004.[3]
The mechanical scanning people have real products, but the ones that can rapidly collect enough data for a point cloud still cost too much.
So Lumotive isn't that novel. The video on the Lumotive site is a render, not a demo.[4] If they had a price, a "buy" button, and reviews, now that would be progress. The vaporware to product ratio in this industry is far too high.
Somebody needs to get this right so we can have vehicle anticollision systems that profile the ground and don't plow into stationary objects.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13/how-a-bil...
[2] https://precisionlaserscanning.com/2017/12/mems-mirrors-vs-p...
[3] https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.1765211
[4] https://www.lumotive.com/
Leddar ships a flash LIDAR, but it's 16x1 pixels. Useful for near obstacle detection, but not enough to create a point cloud. Quanergy seems to have problems, but they have demoed[1] ASC has a 128x128 pixel unit, expensive but good. Those are the main flash LIDAR players.
MEMS mirror scanning looked promising. It worked for video projectors. But it has problems in the automotive environment, apparently.[2]
Liquid crystal beam steering goes back to at least 2004.[3]
The mechanical scanning people have real products, but the ones that can rapidly collect enough data for a point cloud still cost too much.
So Lumotive isn't that novel. The video on the Lumotive site is a render, not a demo.[4] If they had a price, a "buy" button, and reviews, now that would be progress. The vaporware to product ratio in this industry is far too high.
Somebody needs to get this right so we can have vehicle anticollision systems that profile the ground and don't plow into stationary objects.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13/how-a-bil...
[2] https://precisionlaserscanning.com/2017/12/mems-mirrors-vs-p...
[3] https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.1765211
[4] https://www.lumotive.com/