TU-TESL

• 22

So far, luminar, a San Francisco start-up of lidar sensors, has raised more than $250 million and is introducing a subscription business, foreign media reported. At CES 2020, the company launched a lidar sensor, Hydra, and is preparing to repeat charges to car manufacturer partners using the sensor, which is the first in the industry. Designed for highway scenes, hydra can detect roads within 80 meters, lanes within 150 meters and objects within 250 meters. Moreover, luminar's new sensing computer only needs 30 watts of power. The reference design of hydra is supported by NVIDIA's Xavier hardware (luminar points out that the energy consumption is less than ordinary TV sets). In addition, Hydra has a maximum detection distance of 500 meters, which has the property of velocity point cloud on both point and object level. Moreover, Hydra has the super-high resolution of lidar, i.e. advanced interleaving scanning and adaptive scanning capabilities, which can improve the frame rate of effective resolution to 20Hz to 30Hz, and can detect objects, lane marks and roads by frames. Moreover, every point in the created point cloud contains an object class attribute to support tracking algorithm. Luminar will launch Hydra with a suite of software in the first quarter of this year, although the price of Hydra has not yet been announced. Hydra complements luminar's iris product, a full stack platform and ADAS add-on developed by a team led by Christoph Schroeder, vice president of software (formerly head of R & D at Mercedes North America). Iris integrates hardware and software into a package, with two styles: one is a more mature version, which can support off hand "high speed", the other is a cheaper version of ADAS, which can realize automatic driving functions such as emergency braking and emergency steering. Luminar has said it expects higher production when the iris system is launched in 2022. The company said the current offer and multi-year contracts are worth more than $1.5 billion. A year before luminar launched Hydra and iris, the company announced a partnership with autonomous intelligent driving (AID), a spin off of autopilot technology, and became a supplier of Volkswagen Group brands such as and. Last June, luminar teamed up with Volkswagen to equip the prototype with lidar sensors to detect objects. Recently in Munich, aid began testing teams equipped with forward-looking systems backed by luminar sensors. In June 2018, luminar announced its second open partner, while in September 2017, the Institute became its first open partner. Volvo has made "significant investment" in luminar through Volvo car technology fund, which focuses on "high potential" technology start-ups in the fields of artificial intelligence, automatic driving, digital mobile travel services and electrification. According to Volvo, luminar's research and development team is developing a computer vision attitude estimation technology (trying to understand the position of different points in the object) to predict the body language and intention of pedestrians. In the next five years, the market value of lidar is expected to reach US $1.8 billion, which will be a very competitive field. Following Oryx and tetravue, innoviz raised $38 million in June last year. Last January, laser radar startup Baraja raised $32 million to innovate its prism like optical design. Waymo, alphabet's autonomous driving subsidiary, also said last year that it would start selling its proprietary short-range, 360 degree lidar product, laser bear Honeywell, to "dozens" of customers. Not to mention far infrared sensor pioneer AdaSky, ground penetrating radar WaveSense and speed sensor company Aeva, the three companies are also seeking research and development technology to improve vision based traditional automatic driving vehicle perception system. However, luminar is working with 40 automotive partners and 12 of the world's 15 largest automotive OEMs, with 60 patents and more than 350 employees in Palo Alto, Orlando and Colorado Springs.