Non-scanning means your flash emits the equivalent of all the beams at the same time. Look at their flagship spec, you must master 160A next to the other electronics. Two board designs are more expensive and error prone, can't get 160 amps through a flex-cable easily. Then there is the opening angle, you need wide _and_ long, at least for front and rear facing and the optics for that are challenging. Another influence certainly is that the automated driving craze has been superseded by the AI craze and scaling won't come in the time frame that was predicted some years ago. Disclaimer: worked in AD since 2012 (too late for the urban challenge unfortunately ;)) and in a company building sensors and a full stack. P.S.: a QNX desktop is possible and actually alive again, but company politics... :/

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MezzoDelCammin 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Also there's the simple physics view of the same problem. The advantage of scanning is that you can focus all the laser pulse energy into one narrow beam. Non scanning means covering the whole field of view at once with that same laser pulse. Then you have a choice. Either somehow deal with the exponentially weaker return pulse (since it's spread over the whole field of view), or try to increase the pulse energy (and there you're limited by laser safety regulations)

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jlokier 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

From a physics point of view, continuous transmission and correlation detection of a temporally- and spatially-diverse optical signal over the entire field of view addresses the problem of energy being spread out, and gets you better, more robust depth information for less emitted energy than scanning or full-field flashes.

But from an optical and electronics point of view, it's much harder to process the return signal that way, and probably uses a lot more energy due to the processing required (with current tech).

	▲	namibj 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Actually the same rule as for RADAR also applies to LIDAR: single pulse has better energy efficiency, but requires untenable peak power at any vaguely-state-of-the-art signal quality/reception performance levels. The reason is that you can time-gate the noise out that would otherwise be hitting your correlation accumulators if you have a vague idea of the supposed delay/ToF for the pulse. However, once you add mechanical scanning, at least for systems with not that many orders of magnitude between range resolution and maximum detection range, you can use systems like mode-locked lasers that for example have around 0.1% native duty cycle, circumvent the issue of peak power through the aperture/scanning 's spatial focusing (each pixel only needs a managable amount of energy, and delivering that in a single pulse won't require unreasonable peak power levels), and still get all the energy-efficiency benefits of single-pulse ranging vs. spread-spectrum/correlation ranging. The only but major downside is the requirement of mechanical scanning.

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tubs 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Quadratically weaker, not exponentially.

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Animats 3 days ago | parent [-]

Fourth power of the distance, actually. That's the radar equation. You have inverse-square losses going out, as the beam expands with distance. Then you have inverse-square losses coming back when the target is much smaller than the beam. That's the problem flash LIDARs face. It can be overcome with enough laser power out to 20-30 meters.

That's where the beam diameter at the target is much larger than the target, as for aircraft. With a small scanning dot from a LIDAR and a nice big target like a car, almost all the power hits the target, but you still have inverse square losses coming back.

	▲	MezzoDelCammin 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		true. My original was just a quick jote on a phone sipping a coffee on Sunday. I admit I simply didn't want to go into the whole "square FOV for the sensor vs. one detector / diode and that combined with the time of flight loss over distance", so I just used "exponential" to mean "it loses power pretty quickly". Apologies for the sloppiness on my part. Second part of the comment I omitted is was what You mentioned in the beginning. Those 20-30 meters of practical range is why we keep seeing small LIDAR sensors on things like iPhones / iPads (though there I believe the range is even a bit shorter due to the size / power constraints), but not really much beyond that. For practical demo of what's currently available at the high end of solid state LIDAR (albeit at 40k+ USD), I'd suggest looking at Leica and their BLK2GO PULSE (solid state) vs the rest of the BLK line (rotating laser spot).

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Animats 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 160A

For how long? Can't be continuous. What's average power. Yes, flash LIDAR has a power problem. How does their long-range LIDAR work?

> Another influence certainly is that the automated driving craze has been superseded by the AI craze and scaling won't come in the time frame that was predicted some years ago.

Huh. Good point. Want to think about that one.

We might max out at most taxis being self-driving, because that works and sells, but not make it to personal vehicles.

> P.S.: a QNX desktop is possible and actually alive again, but company politics... :/

I'm out of that now. The closed source/open souce/closed source/open source/closed source transitions angered too many people. There was once Netscape/Firefox for QNX.

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mahirsaid 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

While i was reading this article i did find another article (AD) that was showcasing a product of LidAR tech in a small package. It seems unpractical to be very useful a long sim module with its own processing unit and on board electronics. The require space for the module to be installed was above the windshield and the roof. Much like other products of the same category, however this was a lot more compact. Seems to be a push for further compact innovation in this category. i was under the impression there was no need for multiple LIdar module on one vehicle, all you needed was one along with cameras to further assist the LIdar module .I do know that under normal operation the LIdar and camera system are separate and have different responsibilities.

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Joel_Mckay 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Solid state LADAR with 8km range and spectroscopic chemical analysis capabilities have been around for decades (mostly CO2 and Nitrate concentration along with 3D point cloud data etc.)

However, the chances anyone will see that technology in a consumer product is very low. These were also never cost effective, and priced several times more than most cars. Additionally, like all optics these couldn't handle excessive dust, rain, direct sunlight, and bug guts.

Most platforms included millimeter Radar for when vision and LIDAR/LADAR optics fail. QNX simply missed its largest market launch window in the 1990s, and is no longer the path forward for a lot of projects. Note "AI" might be real someday (unlikely an LLM), but every hype-cycle needs to run its course. =3