Self-driving moves closer with new LiDar innovation

Self-driving cars might just have moved a step closer after German automotive powerhouse Robert Bosch revealed what it says is the world’s first long-range LiDar system.

The Light Detection and Ranging (LiDar) system, critical to a car’s ability to identify objects on the road in three dimensions, will be demonstrated for the first time at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Bosch insists the system will mate up with current analogue camera and radar systems, “complementing each other perfectly and delivering reliable information in every driving situation”.

“By filling the sensor gap, Bosch is making automated driving a viable possibility in the first place,” Bosch board member Harald Kröger insisted.

“We want to make automated driving safe, convenient and fascinating. In this way, we will be making a decisive contribution to the mobility of the future.”

LiDars help the car understand its precise surroundings by emitting laser pulses and then measuring the returning beams. It can be used to build digital maps in front of the car for everything from other cars and trucks, motorycles, pedestrians, animals and even rocks and roadside furniture like traffic islands and barriers that can be invisible to cameras and radar.

It is less susceptible to having its information corrupted by strong light, like direct setting sunlight, than radar or cameras are.

It comes on the heels of a wave of news about solid-state LiDar, which promises to lower the cost of LiDar sensors from thousands of dollars each to less than US$1000 per unit.

BMW has teamed with Israeli startup Innoviz and Magna and promises to have a solid-state LiDar in a production car next year.

Germany’s ZF is also teasing its solid-state LiDar, as is Quanergy and LiDar leader Velodyne.

Traditional LiDar units that take up massive chunks of the grilles of Audi’s A6, A7 and A8 models, along with its larger SUVs, plus Mercedes-Benz’s more popular large cars and BMW’s luxury cars. Even Waymo’s industry-leading experimental autonomous cars use spinning LiDar units.

They are also very expensive, though the price to the car industry is said to have fallen by around 70 percent since the advent of active cruise control.

Typical LiDar units from Velodyne house a mechanically driven unit that spins continuously to provide a 360-degree view of the car’s surroundings.

The Innoviz unit BMW will use won’t technically be a solid-state system, but will be much smaller than the usual LiDar, with a fixed laser beam that is redirected by a spinning mirror, rather than having a spinning laser beam.

The reduction in complexity on solid-state LiDar will mean the units will be cost-effective to fit in more mass-production cars, giving them an instant lift in their self-driving capability.