Compared with new energy vehicles that only bring about changes in driving methods, autonomous driving will fundamentally completely subvert the ecology of the automotive industry. At the same time, autonomous driving will also revolutionize traffic life and travel methods. It is also in view of the importance of autonomous driving that countless giants and startups have joined in.
Looking at the road with your eyes is the same as self-driving cars. Lidar is the "eye" of self-driving cars. With the landing of autonomous driving, lidar, which is mainly used for three-dimensional scanning, has become the "standard" of autonomous vehicles, and even determines the evolution level of the autonomous driving industry.
Can lidar be replaced?
In recent years, the safety lidar scanner has become a controversial focus in the industry. Due to its high precision, high resolution and high stability, almost all autonomous vehicle manufacturers have been unable to avoid LiDAR in the past few years, which has made LiDAR almost monopolize the sensor market and the price of devices remains high. Therefore, some companies choose to reduce the cost of lidar to achieve profitability. The first thing Google's self-driving company Waymo did after it became independent was to work hard to reduce the cost of lidar from the industry standard of $75,000 by 90%. However, blindly reducing costs will also bring many problems. It is understood that some companies have adopted cheaper solid-state lidars in order to reduce the price of the entire vehicle, which has brought new problems. The radar cannot achieve 360-degree rotation, and it is difficult to detect the situation behind it. It is necessary to introduce new sensors to assist safe driving, which is not feasible in terms of economic benefits.
In order to reduce the cost of 2D safety protection laser scanners, some automobile companies represented by Tesla simply pulled Lidar into the blacklist and developed other technical routes. The reporter learned from Tesla's official website that a Tesla has a total of 8 cameras, a 77GHz millimeter-wave radar and 12 ultrasonic radars. Lu Wenliang, general manager of CCID Consulting's Automotive Industry Research Center, said that although there is no lidar in the configuration list of Tesla cars, Tesla will try to make other sensors better, and at the same time, it must cooperate with more powerful computing power. The back-end sensor chip and processing chip.
In addition, there are three ways to go for future autonomous vehicle sensors: one is to strengthen the performance of the sensor side (vision system, millimeter wave radar and lidar, etc.), and accordingly reduce the computing power requirements of the decision side; the other is to use external networks to achieve The overall control of autonomous driving. In the future, the 5G network will provide a stronger technical foundation for the Internet of Vehicles, but it is still difficult to achieve in a short time. The third is to completely avoid Lidar and integrate other sensors such as cameras, millimeter waves and ultrasonic radar. Problems such as insufficient detection accuracy of the front-end sensor will be compensated by the chip with more computing power at the decision-making end.
Future outlook
At present, the mainstream of vehicle-mounted lidar is still mechanical lidar, but in the long run, it is difficult to meet the large-scale, low-cost, and vehicle-level requirements of the popularization of autonomous driving. Lidar has not been applied on a large scale in the automotive field for a long time, obviously because the price of tens of thousands of dollars is too expensive.
In addition, the need for technological upgrades in environmental awareness in robots, AVG vehicles, space mapping, and drones will further promote the development of light and small solid-state lidars. It is foreseeable that in the future, lidar will develop towards solidification, miniaturization, and mass production, and achieve high reliability and low cost.
From this trend point of view, no matter what technological path is used, to realize the industrialization of lidar, it must meet the conditions of high reliability, low cost, high precision, high resolution and so on.
