If you learned everything you know about self-driving cars from Elon Musk’s Twitter feed, you’re missing a lot. Companies including Waymo (part of Google) and startups such as Zoox have unveiled autonomous vehicle lidar shuttle concepts, as have traditional manufacturers including Cadillac and Toyota (it was one of Toyota’s shuttles that collided with a visually impaired athlete during the Tokyo Paralympics last month). And Waymo is currently allowing the general public to hail its driverless shuttles in Phoenix. There’s also a world of smaller companies working to build the hardware that will help driverless cars, shuttles, and delivery bots perceive our world. One of those companies is AEye, a California-based lidar (which stands for light detection and ranging) firm with a sensor that, when mounted on a car, can detect obstacles—even small ones—from quite a long distance.
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From an article in Car and Driver by Annie White.
We saw the current iteration of AEye’s technology at work during a late-June test at a facility in Michigan. A Ford Fusion with an AEye lidar mounted on top was stationed near the entrance to a tunnel like one you might come across on an urban freeway. The road curved as it entered the tunnel, and AEye reps placed various obstacles in the shade created by the overhang. Two humanoid dummies and a canine one were set 361 feet away. Five large bricks were scattered in the road 33 feet past the dummies.
From where we stood—beneath a tent pitched next to the car—none of the obstacles were clearly visible. AEye had intended to showcase the system’s abilities in both good weather and bad, setting up a rainmaker between the car and the tunnel. But at the time of the test, natural rain was coming down so hard that AEye’s engineers had to raise their voices to be heard over the sound of water pounding on the roof of the tent.
Weather matters here as lidar works by sending out laser pulses, with a receiver sensing the light reflected from any obstacles it encounters and—aided by a lot of code—using that information to pinpoint the location and the type of obstacles in a car’s path. Driving rain like what we were experiencing during the AEye test could theoretically flummox a lidar system. Water can absorb some of the light the laser sends out, leaving both less light and information to bounce back to the system’s sensors.
For the complete article on autonomous vehicle lidar CLICK HERE.
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