LiDAR

“And the state of the industry right now is LiDAR is hands down a useful sensor specifically for data collection and the R&D phase of autonomy development.”

“If you see, for example, a Tesla R&D vehicle, it actually has LiDAR on it to this day, right? In, in the Bay Area, we see these you'll see like Model Ys or CyberCab that have LiDARs on them just driving around.”

“It's not like, you know, we estimate, you know, what's happening with the world through cameras, and through radars, and through lighters, and then we compare. No, they're like, there's an encoder for camera, there's an encoder for lighters, and they all go in…”

“What actually turned out was happening is that our peripheral lighters bounce under the bus, and there was just a little bit of very, very noisy reflection of the movement of the person's feet. That was enough for the AI models that, hey, I likely there's a pe…”

“Radars are extremely cheap. LiDars are now, you know, very, very cheap. But the really expensive part of the system is actually the onboard inference. And so that's like an order imagine more expensive than any of the perception stack.”

“It's a lot harder to hide from synthetic systems. So if you're talking about like, radars, or lidars, or, there's a large number of ways that you can see the world that are not just visible spectrum imaging. People are actually relatively easy to fix.”

“And these days, lighter costs are a couple hundred dollars a sensor back in 2014. So barely 10 years ago, there was something like 75,080 thousand dollars a sensor. So wild decrease.”

“Six, seven years ago a LiDAR was 20,000 dollars. 15 years ago LiDAR was 75,000 dollars. Today a LiDAR is like 200 bucks. So it's a very low cost sensor.”

“LiDAR was 20, 30,000 bucks a pop like five, six years ago. Now solid state LiDAR is 300 to 500 bucks a pop.”

“The cost of LiDAR, you know, solid state LiDAR now is, 405 hundred bucks.”

“Because it is just intractable to maintain a three-D map of every square inch of the planet and update it in real time, and then expect that every time you go somewhere, the map is still accurate on one hand, and also probably unrealistic to assume that every …”

“The moment that that the lidar with suitable spec appears on the market, we will absolutely use it. So we are not like religiously anti anti lidar at all.”

“And so, using that type of information was kind of the next generation of our product, That allowed us to get more accurate readings of the behavior of the conductor and ultimately be able to provide the dynamic line rating.”

“If you're making a bet on the right technical approach in 20, 25, it does not involve a bunch of expensive LIDARs or exotic sensors. It involves the most commodity is sort of, you know, high volume, readily available sensors you can get, and probably just seve…”

“We can use either LiDAR or camera alone. So you can use either one. Using both together allows you to get a more accurate picture of the terrain around, around the vehicle.”

“LiDAR, Projects projects into the environment. And so you can see it you know, very easily if you have the right sort of sensors.”

“Same, same for us. We can, you know, take something away and we can answer that question. Like, is the performance, can you still drive? Of course. Is the performance good enough? For full autonomy, and is it good enough for our bar of readiness and safety? An…”

“Well, autonomy is like the given. I think most people would probably agree with that. And you know, we'll probably solve it with just cameras and we'll need LIDAR cause humans don't have LIDAR and you know, the cost of vehicles and sensors will come down, remo…”

“Tesla actually does use a lot of expensive sensors. They just do it at training time. So there are a bunch of cars that drive around with LIDARs. They do a bunch of stuff that like doesn't scale and they have extra sensors, et cetera, and they do mapping and a…”

“And that's when the first time we ever used a lidar, which is a type of self-driving technology that all the cars or many of the cars have, it was already existed, but it was applied to cars for the first time ever.”

“This diversity and redundancy is really how you get higher levels of safety. So cameras are great, but they don't work in all conditions, and so when you combine radar, when you combine lidar, you have the strengths of many different types of sensors, and they…”

“If you want to be able to prevent accidents and do autonomous, right, this is not an optional system. This is something that's fundamentally required to be able to prevent accidents.”

“The whole point of the LiDAR, in addition to being able to get the three-D depth, is that it sees the exact same, whether it's pitch black outside, or whether there's bright sunlight shining into the sensor. You know, they get the same output, because it's act…”

“You know, you take the Volvo case of, you know, being the first to introduce the modern three-point seatbelt. What, that was like, 1958, 1959, you know, something that ultimately, Obviously got adopted across the broader industry and ultimately became a regula…”

“You're competing against the smartest people on earth in the most competitive field ever where technology is going to like make everything obsolete every three years. And that's just a very hard way to win.”

“It can't do this. It doesn't have the same LiDAR capabilities, and nobody's talking about this.”

“The majority of accidents happen at night in the whole point of the LIDAR, in addition to being able to get the three D depth is that it sees the exact same, whether it's pitch black outside or whether there's bright sunlight shining into the sensor.”

“Historically, LIDARs would only ever be able to see in very low resolution and only out, you know, for many types of hard-to-see objects, only 30, 40 meters at most. You know, here we are showing it at extreme clarity at, like, 250 meters with all the right ch…”

“The sensors at that time, you know, didn't have the level of reliability or capability that we would need, that we would trust, you know, to go to full autonomy. So we build, you know that generation had our own lighters and, you know custom sensor suite.”

“We did a whole LiDAR distribution system and uploaded seven million points, and now we have an asset associated database in GIS, which means we have a whole distribution system modeled in GIS. Our next step is making those models power flow models. We have abo…”

“Saying you love lidars and hate cameras or vice versa is saying you love one wavelength versus the other wavelength, right? It's not a fundamental thing.”

“The amount we have been able to cost down these LiDARs in the last two years is incredible.”

“I think in the future, you know, the cost of LiDAR is coming down to the point where they basically cost the same as a camera, and so I wouldn't be surprised if in the future you see Teslas with very low-cost LiDARs, and you might see cruise vehicles with very…”

“You can't solve it with sensors. You can't solve it with compute power. You can't solve it with, ah, ah, LiDAR. You can't solve it by knowing exactly where everything, everything is.”

“We did a lot of work with LiDAR, but the vehicles were super heavy, super expensive. So when we started Skydio, we made a big bet on vision because we felt like the progress that's happening in computer vision now especially with deep learning, but even in sor…”

“I never referred to sextants as primitive. They were, you know, the LIDAR of the day. I mean, sextants opened up the whole world and created the ability to make scale maps and to map essentially beyond where you were.”

“Whereas if you have LIDARs in your robot today, You can assume that they're going to drop five X in price in the next three years.”

“There are so many LIDAR companies, and there's, more importantly, there's so many investors who don't really have the competency to understand which LIDAR innovations are meaningful, and really what it even takes to make a LIDAR company successful, right?”

“And there certainly are startups that are working on autonomy, literally with cameras and deep learning alone without the help of LIDAR.”

“Most people that I talk to think definitely LiDAR. There's a couple of big outliers. I think Tesla is trying a system without LiDAR, but we'll see.”

“The first LiDAR for a Google car was 75,000 dollars. Now LIDAR is sub 500 dollars, and I'll bet you, and this is just like, there are no self-driving cars out there. I bet you it goes to 50 cents in the not-too-distant future.”