Not sure where you got the idea that Waymo doesn’t value hardware development - their whole lawsuit saga against Uber was over lidar trade secrets (google “laser is the sauce”). Maybe you were thinking of Tesla who has insisted their existing video/radar stack will be competitive with enough ML? For all the other major SDV companies I’m familiar with, affordable and peformative lidar is a huge focus.
deepnotderp|7 years ago
Most companies want lidar to get cheaper not better. Very rarely has the solution to a perception problem been "better sensors" as opposed to "more ml".