The tech industry has spent the last decade asking whether self-driving cars need lidar sensors, cameras, or all of the above. Lidar company Ouster says it has a new answer: put them both on the same sensor.
On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced a new line of lidar sensors it calls “Rev8,” which offer so-called “native color lidar.” These sensors are able to capture color images and 3D depth information simultaneously, doing the work of two sensors in one.
Ouster CEO Angus Pacala said the development is a decade in the making at his company, and he’s not shy about his ambitions for the new product line in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, calling it the “holy grail of what a roboticist has always wanted.”
“Throughout human history, it’s been: you buy a lidar sensor, you buy a camera, and you try to understand the combination with some higher-level reasoning, and you waste a huge amount of time doing it,” he told TechCrunch. “And companies are only halfway there when it comes to calibrating and fusing data streams.”
Ouster’s new sensors, he said, change that equation.
“The goal is to bypass cameras. There’s no reason a sensor can’t do both,” he said.
The Rev8 series arrives at a dynamic time for lidar companies. There’s been a wave of consolidation over the years, with Ouster buying Velodyne and Luminar’s assets recently being bought out of bankruptcy.
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At the same time, the sensor market is exploding. Waymo and others have finally developed functional robotics and are scaling quickly. Robotics companies—humanoid and industrial—are raising investment dollars and need sensors to sense the world. There is so much interest in the space that new companies like Boston-based Teradar are popping up and testing the waters in entirely new ways. (In Teradar’s case, it uses terahertz imaging.)
A color lidar that combines accurate depth information with camera-quality image data could be especially valuable to robotics players, Pacala said. And he said Ouster worked with Fujifilm and image science company DXOMARK to understand “what it means to create a great camera.”
In fact, Pacala claims that Ouster’s color lidar “improves in many ways on a modern camera” thanks to the way the company already designs and manufactures its sensors.
Ouster uses a so-called “digital lidar” architecture. Instead of the analog approach, which involves a lot of moving parts, Ouster captures the lidar information directly on its custom chip using what are known as single-photon avalanche diode detectors (SPADs).
The company uses the same SPAD technology to capture the color image data on the Rev8 sensors. Pacala said this new technique allows its image capture to be more sensitive than a normal camera.
“It’s 48-bit colour, 116dB dynamic range, like mega pixel resolution. Those are the top numbers that make it a good camera for the pound. But it happens to come as a pre-made stream as a 3D colored point cloud,” he said. “You can actually use the data as a camera feed as well, but that’s one of the strengths of this system is that you can use just the lidar feed, you can use just the camera feed, or you can use the pre-filtered feed, depending on how forward-thinking your perception team is.”
Pacala said his company has already shipped samples to existing customers and is now accepting orders. He said he’s particularly proud of the OS1 Max sensor, which he says he considers “the best long-range lidar in the industry.” It can see 500 meters in all directions and is smaller than other long-range lidars “by a wide margin.”
“We had a long-range LiDAR, but it wasn’t clearly a cut above anything else,” he said. “This is a big jump for Ouster. I think it means we’ll start to see it a lot more in high-speed robo-trucking applications, robotaxi, I think a lot of drones will move to OS1 Max.”
Other new lidars built on the Rev8 platform will include OS0, OS1 and OSDome, according to a press release.
Ouster isn’t the only company to start talking about color lidar. Last month, the Chinese company Hesai announced it own color lidar platform which he says will go into mass production by the end of this year. Other companies, such as Innoviz, have previously presented their own views on “color lidar”.
However, Pacala says that most other players who try to “bundle” cameras and lidar sensors basically package them together in a box. Ouster’s (and, to be fair, Hesai’s) approach puts the lidar and imaging technology on the same chip.
This dramatically reduces the amount of work Ouster customers have to do to understand competing sensor streams, Pacala said, and also positions those customers to avoid cameras altogether — all while being cheaper and smaller than Ouster’s previous technology.
“This fundamentally changes the value proposition of what we sell to a customer from that stage onwards,” he told TechCrunch.
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