LAS VEGAS – Today’s vehicles are a whole lot more intelligent than those from just a decade ago, but they need flawless powers of observation and decision-making if they are to safely drive themselves in the coming years.
German supplier Continental’s technology solution is High Resolution 3D Flash LiDAR intended to replace the current LiDAR scanners seen perched atop Google and other autonomous test vehicles. The supplier says it will begin producing the new solid-state sensing devices for vehicles in 2020.
LiDAR provides a 3-D view of a vehicle’s surroundings, and the budding market is dominated by Velodyne, which makes conventional scanning devices that can be seen rotating as a vehicle is moving.
Those initial scanners are large, clunky and enormously expensive, costing more than $10,000 for one vehicle. Plus, they have many moving parts, particularly the mirrors that use reflections to build a digital image of a vehicle’s surroundings.
Moving parts are subject to mechanical failure, so they are less reliable than Continental’s stationary laser modules, one of which would be placed at each corner of the car to construct a 360-degree view around it, Ralph Lauxmann, the supplier’s senior vice president-systems and technology, says here at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show.
“High-flash LiDARs are, from the quality of the picture, much better than those scanning LiDARs,” Lauxmann says at CES. “In all circumstances, obscured objects can be seen with high-flash LiDAR, which is not possible with scanning LiDAR used today.”
Current systems often fail to properly detect objects in twilight, darkness, dust, fog, rain and other adverse weather, as well as pedestrians in direct sunlight, he says.
During a recent autonomous test drive in Switzerland, Lauxmann says Continental’s system, with high processing power, smartly identified fog at the entrance of a tunnel and reacted properly by slowing down the vehicle. The technology also can read and respond to signs calling for lower speeds at toll gates on the highway, and connect with the vehicle braking system to stop when necessary.
Continental’s High Resolution 3D Flash LiDAR is meant to work in tandem with cameras and long-range radar sensors – not replace them – in reading a vehicle’s complete surroundings.
All available technologies have been employed in autonomous test vehicles driven thousands of miles by Continental engineers, including a road trip from Michigan to Florida and back, Lauxmann says.
With three years until launch, Lauxmann says it is difficult to estimate the cost difference between Continental’s system and current LiDAR scanners, because Velodyne and other producers likely will continue improving them.
“We do not know where they will end up in 2020 when we are ready for market with these sensors,” he tells WardsAuto. “But we expect we are, price-wise, in a better range than those sensors you already can buy.”
Tested extensively in aeronautics applications, 3D Flash LiDAR uses a laser as a transmission source, like the flash of a camera, to illuminate vehicle surroundings up to about 656 ft. (200 m).
A highly integrated receptor chip, like a sensor chip in a digital camera, records the laser pulse transit time and the reflected light on each pixel, which corresponds to the range from the objects. Continental says this simple method allows highly accurate and distortion-free images of the surroundings to be generated with every laser flash.
Data from the various sensors can be processed to construct a complete 3D model of a vehicle’s surroundings in just 1.32 microseconds – 30 times per second, the supplier says.
