In February this year, 11 departments such as the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the "Smart Car Innovation Development Strategy". This is a top-level blueprint drawn at the national level, and it is clear that smart cars are a new generation of cars with autonomous driving functions. The blessing of policies provides strategic guidance for the development of intelligent connected cars, and the progress of autonomous driving technology is undoubtedly the key to promoting the development of intelligent connected cars.
When it comes to the key technologies of autonomous driving, chips, algorithms, simulation, high-precision maps and navigation, radar and multi-sensor fusion are included, but sensors undoubtedly determine whether unmanned vehicles can go more stable and go further . Lidar, millimeter wave radar and camera are recognized as the three key sensor technologies for autonomous driving. Among them, lidar is the focus of researchers.
If you want to be the "eye" of an unmanned vehicle, you have no skills. The significant technical advantages of the safety laser scanner make it a weapon for unmanned vehicles to pass smoothly. In summary, lidar is a sensor unit with high precision, large viewing angle, and wide ranging range. High-density, image-level point cloud data can be acquired through radar, including the three-dimensional information of the road's static environment and moving objects.
Compared with traditional sensors, Lidar has the advantage that it can obtain road zebra crossings and pedestrians and vehicles passing by the zebra crossing area from the point cloud image. The clear sidewalk area is conducive to delineating the electronic fence area. Some lidar products currently on the market have achieved better results.
In the scanning of static targets, the products of the "domestic" Lidar company represented by Hesai Technology performed well. In terms of point cloud density, Hesai’s 64-line lidar Pandar64 obtains a large number of points returned by the target object, and even ranks in front of a 128-line lidar manufactured by a foreign manufacturer.
In addition, in 2018, Volvo made a "strategic investment" in Lidar company Luminar, using this startup's high-resolution long-range sensors to build autonomous vehicles. On May 7, Volvo announced that the new car equipped with lidar will begin off-line in 2022. Volvo said that these cars will be able to drive themselves on the highway without human intervention, and will start off-line in 2022.
Accurate and reliable lidar is the core of the safety and stability of the automatic driving perception system. In order to expand the market and gain recognition from more users, well-known lidar and solution providers at home and abroad will build a complete matrix of lidar products and lidar solutions with practicality and sense of technology using core technologies independently developed. , From the car end to the road end to create a near-perfect "God's perspective" for autonomous driving, to help autonomous vehicles achieve safer, more reliable, and more stable global perception.
As autonomous driving continues to heat up, the global lidar market is also rapidly heating up. According to data from relevant agencies, the global lidar market will reach US$844 million in 2019, but will increase to US$2.273 billion in 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 18.5%.
Some analysts believe that 2019-2020 is a leap forward for the lidar industry. In the past few years, the focus of practitioners in the autonomous driving industry has been to explore and prove the feasibility of lidar technology. The larger market comes from the autonomous driving test market. At present, people are paying more attention to the commercialization of autonomous driving and aiming at the real front-loading market. Based on the vast autonomous driving market space, the broad blue ocean of Lidar still needs to be further explored and tapped.
