The Ouster OS0 and Hesai PandarQT are generally much better choices since they...
* match the field of view of the Laser Bear Honeycomb (OS0: 360 x 90 deg; PandarQT: 360 x 104 deg; Waymo: 360 x 95 deg)
* produce 10x as many points per second
* are available for sale to customers who wish to use them in autonomous vehicles
* have no external moving parts that are liable to get gunked up with wet leaves
* have longer range
Although the main drawbacks are that the Ouster OS0 has only single return and the Hesai PandarQT has dual returns, compared to the Laser Bear Honeycomb's several returns.
So this has got to be prohibitively expensive for home gamers if the request for information form's minimum order size listed is <100.
Is there anything comparable for hobby project lidar scanning? Not necessarily wide angle, since you can always use a turntable, but capable of generating moderately dense point clouds.
Typically the LIDARs that are on autonomous vehicles are pretty low "resolution" compared to smaller LIDAR packages like a Hokuyo or depth sensors like a Kinect. It wouldn't be good for fine detail scanning.
Everyone is complaining about hiding pricing. Hiding pricing is standard practice for most electronic components that you would integrate into an electronics project. It's a method of select customers that won't need a lot of support or will give the volume that makes it worthwhile.
Pretty much, yeah. At my hardware-focused corp, we have specific supply chain people that will argue about price all day. It's just a different business world than retail.
The entire waymo website including the lidar page has been revamped right after this discussion. In case anyone want to revisit the cool new site http://waymo.com/lidar
Even so, Microvision is better at PR than they are at making products! I suspect this is a dying gasp to bump up their stock price. They barely have any engineers after their last layoff.
On the same note: I love the saying that comes up here and other places sometimes "if SpaceX can have pricing on their launches, your SaaS product can provide a pricing section".
If I can't afford it, i'm not of interest to you anyway, if I can afford it, why not give it to me ? Only time I can understand it if you have something highly customized which will greatly affect the price, if not just give it to me.
I would imagine because the hardware itself is borderline useless. There's likely significant integration work and they want to understand how much help you're going to need to integrate it.
Tesla buying the hardware probably just wants a schematic and a part. GM probably wants a crew of 100 engineers to help put it into a car and support it for the duration.
SpaceX is selling a one-time spot on a rocket. That relationship is measured in days, maybe weeks.
Waymo is selling a product that necessarily involves a long business relationship measured over years or months and significant amounts of collaboration. They're simply doing due diligence, like anyone would before entering into a long-term commitment.
Poor waymo, having to pivot to selling peripherals it developed ever since dad cut the purse strings. I wonder how this bodes for their long term plan? From what I understand, Alphabet is getting less and less bullish on a lot of these moonshots.
Is it? Waymo seems to be doing pretty well, it has the largest fleet of autonomous cars and from what i remember by far the most extensive testing program on real streets.
This looks more like an attempt to spread the R&D cost on lidar by selling to third parties. I guess as more and more companies sell their lidar solutions, it becomes more of a commodity and less a differentiation factor, like self-driving software for example.
From a purely economic perspective, this is probably a good strategy even if they had a huge budget.
Each component should compete in the market place.
If there are better components out there, your divisions should be able to buy them instead of internally developed ones.
If a competitor can use your components better and build something better, they should etc.
If a competitor can provide better intermediate products using your components, buy them and incorporate them in your system.
You only have to be one of the best at one thing, and you should be the one of the best at a few things, and you could be one of the best at many things.
The moment Sundar became CEO of Alphabet it should have been clear that the whole experiment was a failure. It is probably too much work to dissolve the entity and fold all the moonshots back into Google, but that's effectively how things are running now.
There's one entire category of applications, which is going to drive disruption that's going to obsolete LIDAR. Namely military applications.
Active sensors aren't viable anymore for military applications outside of severely asymmetrical conflicts. Active sensors will advertise their position to seekers and guided ordinance. Passive sensors are going to be required for military autonomy, and military R&D will guarantee these will supplant active sensors like LIDAR.
Let's say that Tesla goes 100% pacifist, and declares that no Tesla technology, like Dojo, will ever be used for military purposes. Just the fact that Tesla FSD had solved computer vision and the fact that Dojo exists will guarantee that someone will replicate those things for military applications.
Active sensors could still become so cheap, however, that they will be used in applications where each unit must be very cheap and therefore can't have the onboard processing for full-blown autonomy AI and computer vision. LIDAR could then be used to reduce unit costs for those super low unit-cost applications. These LIDAR would be much smaller and much lower power than the LIDAR for autonomous cars.
Except that Tesla hasn’t solved computer vision and may never.
Also Dojo isn’t some magical technology. It’s an FPGA platform which we have available today on AWS and hasn’t changed the game for deep learning use cases. It’s just edge optimised.
LiDAR however has changed the game. It works well and costs are rapidly coming down.
The blackmore lidar startup that aurora recently acquired was a spinout from an active sensing defense company. Additionally a lot of the precision guided munitions make heavy use of active sensing. For a lot of military applications they are fine with active sensing because there isn't a concern about people knowing where they are the concern is getting the job done and collecting as much data as possible.
[+] [-] bostonpete|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vitus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] porphyra|5 years ago|reply
* match the field of view of the Laser Bear Honeycomb (OS0: 360 x 90 deg; PandarQT: 360 x 104 deg; Waymo: 360 x 95 deg)
* produce 10x as many points per second
* are available for sale to customers who wish to use them in autonomous vehicles
* have no external moving parts that are liable to get gunked up with wet leaves
* have longer range
Although the main drawbacks are that the Ouster OS0 has only single return and the Hesai PandarQT has dual returns, compared to the Laser Bear Honeycomb's several returns.
[+] [-] Apofis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Firerouge|5 years ago|reply
Is there anything comparable for hobby project lidar scanning? Not necessarily wide angle, since you can always use a turntable, but capable of generating moderately dense point clouds.
[+] [-] dljsjr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verdverm|5 years ago|reply
Video is 4 MP
lots of nice open source to go with it these days
[+] [-] jonas21|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://scaniverse.com
[+] [-] shusson|5 years ago|reply
not to mention they don't even specify how you can power or connect to the sensor.
[+] [-] lgats|5 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20190424045352/https://waymo.com...
[+] [-] ncmncm|5 years ago|reply
(Clue:
"everyday": adjective; ordinary.
"every day": noun phrase; all days.)
Anyway, Google marketing dept does. Or did, one may hope.
[+] [-] stingrae|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasudasu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nosmokewhereiam|5 years ago|reply
Why don't I see that ever? Is it solved or done better horizontally?
[+] [-] jit_ray_c|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cup_of_joe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BugsJustFindMe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verdverm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gingerbread-man|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevmo|5 years ago|reply
https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/microvision-inc.-announ...
[+] [-] blackguardx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jabbles|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oliv__|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjksf|5 years ago|reply
Waymo: want to buy a lidar from us? Tell us about yourself...
[+] [-] klintcho|5 years ago|reply
If I can't afford it, i'm not of interest to you anyway, if I can afford it, why not give it to me ? Only time I can understand it if you have something highly customized which will greatly affect the price, if not just give it to me.
[+] [-] guyzero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shermozle|5 years ago|reply
Source: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-... (see Notice the gap? There’s no software priced between $1000 and $75,000.)
[+] [-] tw04|5 years ago|reply
Tesla buying the hardware probably just wants a schematic and a part. GM probably wants a crew of 100 engineers to help put it into a car and support it for the duration.
[+] [-] ur-whale|5 years ago|reply
Cultural DNA is hard to shake.
[+] [-] wave_function|5 years ago|reply
https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/
[+] [-] paxys|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] utf_8x|5 years ago|reply
Waymo: "you can't have a self-driving car without LIDAR, trust us"
Also waymo: "on a different note: we sell LIDAR now, completely unrelated tho"
[+] [-] tyingq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ra7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alisonkisk|5 years ago|reply
(SpaceX doesn't sell their rocket parts.)
[+] [-] gamblor956|5 years ago|reply
Waymo is selling a product that necessarily involves a long business relationship measured over years or months and significant amounts of collaboration. They're simply doing due diligence, like anyone would before entering into a long-term commitment.
[+] [-] neighbour|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] layoutIfNeeded|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncallaway|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mvzvm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pastullo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omarhaneef|5 years ago|reply
Each component should compete in the market place.
If there are better components out there, your divisions should be able to buy them instead of internally developed ones.
If a competitor can use your components better and build something better, they should etc.
If a competitor can provide better intermediate products using your components, buy them and incorporate them in your system.
You only have to be one of the best at one thing, and you should be the one of the best at a few things, and you could be one of the best at many things.
[+] [-] bengale|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clapper|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|5 years ago|reply
Active sensors aren't viable anymore for military applications outside of severely asymmetrical conflicts. Active sensors will advertise their position to seekers and guided ordinance. Passive sensors are going to be required for military autonomy, and military R&D will guarantee these will supplant active sensors like LIDAR.
Let's say that Tesla goes 100% pacifist, and declares that no Tesla technology, like Dojo, will ever be used for military purposes. Just the fact that Tesla FSD had solved computer vision and the fact that Dojo exists will guarantee that someone will replicate those things for military applications.
Active sensors could still become so cheap, however, that they will be used in applications where each unit must be very cheap and therefore can't have the onboard processing for full-blown autonomy AI and computer vision. LIDAR could then be used to reduce unit costs for those super low unit-cost applications. These LIDAR would be much smaller and much lower power than the LIDAR for autonomous cars.
[+] [-] threeseed|5 years ago|reply
Also Dojo isn’t some magical technology. It’s an FPGA platform which we have available today on AWS and hasn’t changed the game for deep learning use cases. It’s just edge optimised.
LiDAR however has changed the game. It works well and costs are rapidly coming down.
[+] [-] CaffeineSqurr|5 years ago|reply
https://news.crunchbase.com/news/lidar-startup-blackmore-rai...