Introduction: LiDAR is a radar system that emits a laser beam to detect the position, velocity, and material characteristics of a target. We can divide the laser radar core device into three parts: laser transmitter, optical scanning and receiving components, and photosensitive components.

OFweek Laser Network News: Since Uber abandoned the Chinese market, it seems that the news about it has only been about unmanned cars. Not long ago, a netizen on Instagram uploaded a photo of a Uber unmanned car on a San Francisco road. You should know that California is the state with the strictest regulation of unmanned vehicle testing in the United States, and it seems that Uber unmanned vehicles are doing well now that they can obtain California's road test license plate.

The roof of the Uber unmanned vehicle on Instagram is like a flower pot, and the device is the LiDAR, which is also the "eye" of the unmanned vehicle. The unmanned vehicle's ability to receive road condition information mainly depends on its function.

Lidar is a radar system that emits a laser beam to detect the position, velocity, and material characteristics of a target. We can divide the laser radar core device into three parts: laser transmitter, optical scanning and receiving components, and photosensitive components.

What is the difference between LiDAR on household robots and unmanned vehicles?

Schematic diagram of LiDAR operation

Through the mode shown in the above figure, LiDAR relies on the turning back time of the laser after encountering obstacles to calculate the distance and generate a 3D contour of the object, drawing a map of the surrounding environment of the car. The accuracy of LiDAR is very high, even reaching the centimeter level.

Inventory of Domestic and Foreign LiDAR Technology Related Companies

What is the difference between LiDAR on household robots and unmanned vehicles?

Representative foreign companies related to LiDAR

The above picture shows five representative foreign LiDAR companies, of which three are American companies. And the technology application objects of the five companies are all autonomous vehicles.

What is the difference between LiDAR on household robots and unmanned vehicles?

Inventory of Domestic LiDAR Related Companies

The above figure shows a inventory of domestic LiDAR related companies, including a total of 10 companies. Among these companies, there are three each located in Beijing and Shenzhen, accounting for 30% of the total, and two others are located in Shanghai.

Unlike foreign companies, more companies are focusing on the field of household robots, with 6 companies developing laser radars for robots, accounting for 60% of the total, and 5 companies targeting unmanned vehicles.

The application direction of LiDAR at home and abroad is related to the development time and progress. It started early abroad, so it also occupied the breakthrough point of autonomous vehicles in the first time; However, the development of domestic LiDAR is relatively late, and there is insufficient precipitation in hardware and software, so most of them take service robots as a new entry point.

What is the difference between LiDAR used in autonomous vehicles and household robots?

In 2004, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense began hosting the Unmanned Vehicle Challenge in the southern United States, and the first competition team was completely defeated. The following year, a team from Stanford completed the competition for the first time using LiDAR as a sensor. Since then, LiDAR has been applied to almost all unmanned vehicles.

Currently, mainstream autonomous vehicle research and development teams such as Baidu, Google, and Uber are using LiDAR as one of the sensors, combined with image recognition and other technologies, to enable cars to judge road conditions. The laser radars used in unmanned driving are mainly composed of 16 and 64 lines. The higher the line speed of the multi line laser radar, the more data points it identifies, the higher the accuracy, and the price also rises sharply.

The LiDAR used on household robots has lower intensity, but requires higher equipment volume and cost-effectiveness. Ordinary sweeping robots only need to use a single line LiDAR to obtain 2D data, ensuring that the robot does not collide with the target during movement.

In addition, the entry threshold for the home robot industry is also lower than that of autonomous vehicles. However, even so, it is not easy to transition from research to products. At present, Silan Technology, one of the top domestic laser radar sensing robot companies, only controls the cost of each robot at less than 10000 yuan, which is still a long way from entering ordinary households.

Although LiDAR is a mainstream unmanned driving perception technology, there are still shortcomings

The biggest problem with LiDAR compared to other technologies is its "cost". Taking Baidu as an example, the price of the 64 line LiDAR used in Baidu's unmanned car exceeds 700000 yuan, even surpassing the BMW 3 Series GT (high-end configuration of 540000 yuan) of its unmanned car itself.

Meanwhile, due to the limitations of laser performance, the adaptability of LiDAR to weather is relatively poor. In heavy rain and foggy weather, LiDAR will be subject to strong interference. This is also one of the main reasons why many lidar related research and development companies consider home robots as their "first battlefield".

Therefore, in terms of autonomous driving, although many companies such as Google, Baidu, and Uber are using LiDAR technology, not everyone likes LiDAR, and Tesla CEO Musk is one of them. Musk believes that unmanned driving does not necessarily require LiDAR as a sensor, and millimeter wave radar is a strong competitor to LiDAR.

However, the biggest reason why Tesla abandoned LiDAR is that it has already been commercialized and has had to control costs. Princeton University's Xiao Jianxiong believes that LiDAR is the only unmanned driving solution that can achieve 100% safety.

Therefore, if the cost of LiDAR can be reduced one day in the future, unmanned driving technology will not be far from entering thousands of households.