https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...
Notable that this is an FMCW system. Very few commercial players use frequency modulation, they all use either AM or pulsed lasers.
Rep rate is not so good. 45 ms = 20Hz maximum. That's poor compared to Velodyne (15kHz or so per transceiver) or surveying stations which can push 1MHz. Even hobbyist systems like the Scanse manage 4kHz. I'd guess that the problem is, in part, because you need to chirp for a certain amount of time. Pulsed systems often use avalanche diodes that trigger from relatively few photons.
It's 1D, so you've still got to scan it which is bad for robustness. I'm more excited for solid state LIDAR that uses beam shaping (or however they're doing it) to scan without moving parts.
The range is good though, FMCW is great for that (and the accuracy should be good too). The main advantage of FMCW is that you can still get the high accuracy of AMCW systems (i.e. at a lower bandwith than direct time of flight), but you don't have the phase ambiguity problem that AM does.
If that's their per-sample time, they probably would've dissolved by now after admitting total defeat - 20 Hz is totally unusable for navigation. I'd guess that that's something more like maximum latency from real world to computer, either due to deep pipelining or because they communicate data frames rather than a stream of individual samples. Very easy for that kind of thing to fall through when talking to the media.
What? I've seen lots of autonomous robots that operate at 10 Hz, including mission critical systems for the military. Compared to cameras, which might operate as fast as 60 Hz (but are far more likely to operate at 30 Hz or a fraction thereof) I am confused where you're getting these numbers from. Do you have any citations?
https://www.strobeinc.com/strobe-lidar/
> Number of pixels and field of view is controllable in real time to 'zoom' the resolution.
and the IEEE quote is a bit ambiguous (emphasis mine):
> An image on Strobe’s website seems to suggest that the lidar will be much smaller too, with a footprint as small as an American quarter. A number of these would be needed to generate the 360-degree coverage provided by the rotating, roof-mounted lidars seen on many experimental self-driving cars today.
Needing several implies a fixed field of view, but that could be either 1D or 2D. Given the size of the device (a US quarter apparently) it could be an area imaging device, but that would imply a pretty big improvement in optical technology to get enough signal-to-noise per pixel. I know they claim FMCW requires less sensitive detectors, but there's a limit.
If it was only 1D, it would be utterly unfit for navigation if you just scatter a few of them around on the vehicle in fixed locations like their marketing suggests. You can't replace a spinning roof-mounted lidar with just a few fixed 1D sensors. The spinning lidar gets something on the order of one sample per degree, right? To even come close to replacing that with fixed 1D sensors you'd need on the order of 360 of them around the vehicle, and their marketing doesn't sound like that they expect you to use anywhere near that many.
As someone who works on their own cars, electric and self-driving cars have me scared that it will not be possible in the future.
people vastly over estimate how fast self driving cars will arrive and just as much the electric only revolution
One thing to think about: autonomous cars might make a big difference for car-sharing services or trucking, but they're less essential when you're driving the car yourself and parking in your garage. I think traditional cars will be around for a while. (Particularly in lower-density areas where there's less demand for ride-sharing services.) This article [2] suggests regular cars may be around until 2050 or so:
"According to IHS, a firm that provides automotive forecasts and insights, sales of autonomous cars, including driver control, will begin by 2025 and could reach 11.8 million in 2035; sometime after 2050, says IHS, almost all vehicles will be autonomous."
So your hobby is probably good for another 30 years at least?
[1] http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-second...
[2] http://senseable.mit.edu/papers/pdf/20150803_Claudel_Ratti_F...
Assuming 12 ft by 22 ft (minimum space for a one car garage, rounding down nation wide to be conservative), that's 264 sq ft. In 2016, there were about 125.82 million households in the United States. That's 33.216 billion sq ft of additional living space!
They say they're not making more land; I'd argue we're going to be way more efficient with the land we have in the future.
And lots of garages aren't attached (on this block there are 12 garages with 1 being attached to the house).
Another way to say 30 billion square feet is 15 million to 30 million housing units. A drop in the bucket of the additional housing that will be needed globally in the coming decades.
Good call, my mistake.
> Another way to say 30 billion square feet is 15 million to 30 million housing units. A drop in the bucket of the additional housing that will be needed globally in the coming decades.
I don't think this is the case. Population is on the decline in the industrialized world. Africa, Indian, and China need a whole lot of housing though.
But note that I said global to begin with. I think letting people move around freely is a fine thing.
This link shows a projection Census did in 2012:
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/cspan/pop_proj/20121214_cspa...
They seem to have killed a bunch of urls, but they do tables of future expected population. The US population is very much expected to exceed 400 million before too long.
Hell, some people have so much junk they can't even park their cars in their garage.
I'd guess it's the estimated cost to manufacture, say, half a million units.
GM sold 574,876 Silverados in 2016[1] a new headlamp assembly for a 2016 Silverado costs about $600 each on eBay.
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/best-selling-cars-trucks-vehi...