FEATURE AUTOMOTIVE LIDAR
Powering cars of the future
Andy Extance asks: which laser wavelengths, detector architectures and ranging techniques are required to deliver competitive and cost-effective automotive lidar performance?
T
hough many of us probably don’t know it, some drivers are already benefiting from the safety boost that lidar scanning technology
offers. In 2017, German carmaker Audi reached this early checkpoint on the road to automated driving experiences, integrating lidar into its A8 model. To date, this lidar, from tier one French automotive part supplier Valeo, is the only such product qualified as safe to use in cars. However, other lidar companies are also in the qualification process, noted Alexis Debray, technology and market analyst at industry research company Yole Développement. He cited the collaboration between German carmaker BMW, Canadian tier one part supplier Magna and Israel- based MEMS scanner lidar startup Innoviz. ‘They have a plan to integrate lidar in BMW cars in 2021. This is a big move, showing that lidar is coming to the automotive market.’ He also anticipated Volvo adopting lidar in 2020/2021. Yole estimates that in 2018, the automotive lidar market was worth around $216 million. Another of its technology and market analysts, Pierrick Boulay, stressed that this is not just down to the Audi A8.
14 Electro Optics Augut/September 2019
Even though self-driving robotic cars are a rare sight on roads today, they already represent an important market. Such robotic cars should be fully autonomous, meeting SAE International’s highest standard of automation, at level 5. No such vehicles have been successfully commercialised yet, but development models use up to eight lidar devices per car, Boulay explained, each being more expensive than the price expected for use in personal cars. He added: ‘Once they are commercialised, rather than being sold directly to consumers, robotic cars will be rented as a service, with the companies owning them doing regular maintenance to replace parts or upgrade performance. Yole also forecasts that by 2024 the automotive lidar market will reach $4.3 billion, expanding at a 64 per cent compound annual growth rate. Yet, to deliver that requires optical components that can deliver lidar performance economically. As highlighted above, in the personal car market, price is one factor that currently limits lidar to just the premium A8 model. As costs fall for components, however, lidar will extend to more premium and mid-class cars,
“The sceptics will say large-scale application of lidar in the robot field may be earlier than the large- scale application of lidar in the automatic driving field”
commented Laurent Demezet, key account manager, Hamamatsu Photonics France. Lidar systems are often based on pulsed laser diodes and silicon avalanche photodiode (APD) arrays, with proven solutions exploiting 905nm wavelength light. But other options might include
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