Who can win the big battle of the old guns in the laser radar market?

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Lidar is still the scent of investors and technologists. They are not only optimistic about the application of laser radar in the automotive field, but also have confidence in the application of the technology in the field of drones, industrial automation, maps and robotics. Let's take a look at the related content with the car electronics editor.

It is still too early to judge who can win this laser radar battle. After all, the giants are still struggling to reduce costs. In the end, who can capture more ADAS and autopilot systems is not sure.

In addition, laser radar startups have sprung up all over the world, and if there is sufficient time and money, new industry leaders will emerge.

For example, Israel's Oryx Vision recently received $50 million in Series B financing. With the hot air of laser radar, it has successfully raised $67 million in the past 15 months.

Innoviz Technologies is also an Israeli laser radar startup. It has just received $65 million through Series B financing. Investors not only have VCs, but also auto supplier giants such as Delphi and Magna International. After this round of financing, Innoviz's total financing has reached $74 million. Like Orxy, Innoviz is also a new company that was established in 2016.

Orxy's car flashing LiDAR

Abnormal market activity

Market research companies believe that the future growth of the laser radar market will be affected by the hockey stick effect (in a fixed period, the early sales are very low, there will be a sudden increase in sales at the end of the period, and in a continuous cycle In this case, this phenomenon will repeat, and the shape of the demand curve is similar to that of a hockey stick.

Grand View Research believes that the global automotive laser radar market will grow to $223.2 million by 2024. MarketsandMarkets is more optimistic. It believes that the application of laser radar in other fields will boost its market value. It will reach $5.2 billion in 2022 and a compound annual growth rate of 25.8% in the next five years.

BIS Research believes that the market for automotive laser radar last year was only $65 million, but the compound annual growth rate will remain double-digit in the next decade. Global Market Insights is more concerned about the application of lidar technology in other areas, saying its market size is expected to rise from $355.5 million in 2015 to $1.1 billion in 2023.

From the perspective of geographical distribution, the North American laser radar market will reach 880 million US dollars by 2020, much higher than the 2015 US$ 550 million, with a compound annual growth rate of 9.63%.

Amin Kashi, head of ADAS and Automated Driving at Mentor Graphics, which has been acquired by Siemens for $4.5 billion, said that the size and reliability of Lidar has improved in recent years. In the future, laser radar will abandon moving parts, and the mechanical laser radar system used in Google's early self-driving cars will be eliminated.

“There are at least 16 laser radar companies that are working to make this change,” Kashi said. "But from the roadmap of these companies, the new laser radar will certainly not be able to enter mass production this year. Its components and modules will undergo rigorous reliability and standardized testing, which will take at least one to two years."

Lidar is not a simple chip, and it is not easy to develop a complete solution.

“Reliability is critical,” Kashi said. In addition, one of the hot issues in the industry is how many laser radars do a self-driving car have?

Kashi believes that there is no standard answer to this question, but vehicles with advanced autonomous driving technology must have at least 2 to 5 laser radars.

However, the industry also has different voices, and some market observers believe that autonomous vehicles can live without the laser radar. Kashi disagreed with this view, saying that Lidar can work best with sensors such as cameras and radars.

“The industry is surging,” Kashi said. “Primary suppliers want to squeeze into this market by working with startups. New startups are also doing their part and coming up with many new concepts. If their ideas are not going wrong, if autonomous cars can come as they are, these The company must push the prototype products to the production line. In fact, although the pace of mass production of various companies has accelerated, but in the technical indicators such as the detection range, the companies have not made any progress in these months."

Starting line is different

Of course, the technical failure to continue to break is not because the manufacturers have given up trying, the startups are catching up, they are trying to break the technical barriers of the laser radar from all directions.

We take Cepton Technologies, a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2016, as an example.

“Our core technology is primarily laser emission and sensing arrays, which enable high-resolution images for laser radar,” said Wei Wei, director of business development at Cepton. “For many lidars (especially rotary lidars), the resolution in the vertical direction is soft underbelly, but we do well in both vertical and horizontal directions, and the vertical resolution can reach 4 to 5 times the opponent's resolution.”

Since February of this year, Cepton's laser radar has been shipped to customers in Silicon Valley, Asia and Germany. Cepton's team is now only 30 people and is growing fast. At the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in May this year, Cepton introduced a remote wide-angle laser radar product.

“Our laser radar products function like a camera or human vision system, which concentrates the pixels into a front-view perspective, but this makes it stand out from the market. Other laser radar products still use a 360-degree viewing angle.” Cepton Engineering Vice President Mark McCord said. “This new solution is better suited to the needs of future self-driving cars, because people don’t like the sensor on the roof that keeps spinning. In addition, in the car where there is some 360 ​​degree view, our laser The radar can also be used."

Cepton plans to complete the reliability test for automotive lidars next year and begin joint system validation with automakers in 2019. “In the meantime, we will hurry to find different industrial markets,” Wei said. It is reported that there is a map company that is in contact with Cepton.

The price war is inevitable?

Another Silicon Valley startup, Quanergy Systems, announced in advance that it would win in the battle for lidar. It depends on the price of the killer. Quanergy's solid-state laser radar is priced at $250 and will be in volume production by the end of this month.

However, this product is not yet available for use in self-driving cars. Quanergy CEO Louay Eldada said that the automotive-grade laser radar will be launched in September next year.

“Lidar is the most powerful sensor in industrial automation, and this technology is definitely worth investing,” says Eldada. “But the whole industry will have a big shock in the future, and some companies will rise, but some will collapse in the process of rising.”

In Eldada's view, the price of Lidar can only be reduced to less than $100 to enter new areas such as smart homes and smart cities. With it, we can guarantee the safety of our home without building a fence. “Some people will say, 'Who cares about cost'? Actually, people who say this want to save more money than anyone else,” Eldada said.

Although the startups are gearing up, they want to truly rise and must cross the high mountain of Velodyne. Right now, the company's San Jose plant is ready, it can be fully automated, and next year's goal is to produce millions of laser radars a year. At the same time, Velodyne also has an independent research and development branch VelodyneLabs, the comprehensive strength of the startup company can not be compared with the same day.

Velodyne CTO Anand Gopalan pointed out that Velodyne has more than 10 years of experience in laser radar, and the production of laser radar is also considerable. Recently, Velodyne also got a large list of sensing systems in the Mercedes-Benz R&D department.

“In fact, the biggest challenge facing Lidar is how to improve the detection range and resolution. Of course, reliability and cost are also very important,” Gopalan said. “We have a glorious history, and the demand for the autonomous driving market is quite large, so the sales of laser radar will increase significantly. Velodyne is continuously increasing its production capacity and ultimately achieving the goal of producing one million units per year.”

Velodyne detects the farthest laser radar

It is understood that in addition to consolidating its dominance in the automotive industry, Velodyne's laser radar is still seeking to enter high-precision maps, drones, robots and industrial equipment.

This year, Velodyne launched a solid-state laser radar that will officially enter mass production by the end of next year or 2019. The new product is based on Velodyne's ASIC technology, but the chips used are quite mysterious. Although it is aimed at Level 4/5 autopilot development, it will be used in the ADAS system in the early stage.

“The lidar has revived many of the techniques that have been hidden,” Gopalan said. “It has found re-employment opportunities for many optical technologies.”

Velodyne's plant in San Jose produces the company's flagship product, and with the latest automation technology, they will gradually achieve the goal of “no light factory”.

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