Lidar is a technology that utilizes the idea of radar, but with another medium. The same way as radar uses a sound wave, lidar uses a pulsing beam of different nature — concentrated light, also known as, laser. Which stands for the first part of its name, as you can guess.
And although its main purpose seems to be among near future vehicles, maybe not flying, but expectedly self-driving, the range of its field of use is surprisingly wide.
Angus Pacala, the co-founder and CEO of Ouster, a San Francisco lidar startup, even says that his company never view the technology as exclusively automotive related. And expresses a wish to operate in many different markets.
According to Ouster development chief Raffi Mardirosian, currently they already work with more than half of a thousand clients in about a half of a hundred countries. The company’s technologies are finding itself in robotic and drone delivery and are using in security systems on landfill sites for nuclear waste. Pacala tells that they applied in such futuristic projects as robot-dogs using for disaster relief and rescuing, and such unexpected as dance contests.
One DJ has reached Ouster to use their sensors to monitor a dancing crowd on contests and also to sync music with light-works. Mardirosian believes technology has a potential in the entertainment industry, like in VR. Mardirosian talked about some automatic virtual tour in Louvre as an example.
And the company keeps searching itself in new markets.
From the same bay area, with the same rival technologies. Akram Benmbarek, the business development head of AEye, speaks.
His company is much more focused on the automotive field with a road map to the opportunities it can propose to the technology. It doesn’t mean that it’s only about cars, though. AEye also works on infrastructure systems, from local industrial machinery, like on construction and mining sites, to big and complex, such as automation on railroads, intelligent highways, and technologies in the field of smart cities.
Yet, even AEye specialists get diverse and unspecific tasks time to time. Like a bank interested in monitoring... cows!
A cow says “Moo.” And the bank says “We’d like to observe how this cow’s doing and growing since we are giving a loan to its ranch owner.” Makes some sense, I guess.
What is also makes sense is using light-speed-based sensors for detecting little differences in moving and position of really fast objects. Like in some kinds of sports. Another example of not standard requests for AEye on lidar application.
Its own ideas for the technology also had by DJI, the world’s biggest drone manufacturer located in China. The company revealed its own sensors with a price range between $599 and $999. Which is considered low nowadays, since the common range is widely from about one thousand dollars to twelve.
But even a larger price drop was recently done by the pioneer of lidar technology. Anand Gopalan the CEO of Velodyne presented its new sensor, also the smallest at the time. It happens to be the first time in the company’s history price tag was put in a press release because of how available it made the technology. Just $100.
When sometimes some ways of applying lidar technologies may seem funny or strange, spreading their product as widely as possible on different markets is essential for small startups.
For now, self-driving cars only make their firsts miles on their way to our everyday life, and until they fully here, lidar developers must find their way to financially sustain and develop the technology for its greater future. New ways of application attract new investments. New investments allow developing a cheaper technology. And a cheaper technology opens itself to new markets and new ways of its application.