Automotive leaders are continuing to ramp up investment and development in LiDAR applications for safer human and autonomous driving. Intricate optical components offer an array of industrial and customer-facing advantages, but challenges remain when it comes to detecting physical barriers on the road at speed, along with integration complexities and rising costs. With demands for boosted accuracy and resilience in all weathers rising, there is also a need to balance enhanced capabilities with optimised spending.
Competition in the automotive industry is intensifying as a result of common goals to bring more detailed insights to drivers, and to succeed in scaling autonomous offerings that provide long-term safety. As such, decision-makers in the industry must make the right procurement decisions, with partners dealing in evolving optical imaging tools that are tightly aligned with existing systems.
Electro Optics recently explored the changing landscape of LiDAR sensors for the automotive industry at a roundtable with Materion Balzers Optics, including the challenges of accuracy, cost, ease of integration and the sometimes volatile conditions of the wider automotive market. In this exclusive extract from the White Paper, which you can download by clicking the link below, experts in automotive LiDAR, wider engineering and application development share their perspectives and guidance on achieving the best, most valuable integrations without missteps.
Volume and customisation issues are also rife among suppliers, with silicon photonic component supply often proving too slow for current automotive processes to unleash their full potential. This is exacerbated by a combination of risk-averse attitudes among automotive manufacturers – understandably so given the strict regulations and safety requirements at play – and performance challenges when shifting away from established tools.
Heiko Leppin Senior Expert - Automotive LiDAR at Aumovio, told us: “The problem is: photonic integrated LiDAR has to come to a point in performance, cost and form factor, where it can compete with already established sensors. Then, it has to steal away market share from traditional time-of-flight LiDARs, which it can be superior to. These newer LiDARs might be smaller and cheaper in the long run, but there’s always a risk in changing from proven solutions – in this case, time-of-flight – to something that’s new, such as photonic integrated LiDARs. This is something that car makers don’t like to do, so there has to be an incentive.”
When assessing the current market, Matt Birkebak, Field Applications Engineer at Labsphere, said: “It’s more the ‘level three and above’ autonomous projects that are really leaning in towards LiDAR. This is something that they know they’re going to need if they’re below that level right now. It’s also a cost consideration that you have to think about, except in the Chinese market, where we’ve seen all of the Chinese car manufacturers integrating LIDAR sensors pretty readily. And it’s LIDAR sensors within China going on those cars. We see somewhat less of it with US manufacturers of those things, but they may throw them on the car, without even initially having a lot of features that are using it. That car’s software may then need to be upgraded.”
James Pan, Senior Principal Engineer at Northrop Grumman Corporation, added: “It’s very important to use the technology that’s available. We want the component to be production-ready at a low cost. For LiDAR, there are different kinds of image sensors, such as single photon image sensors or gallium arsenide dial sensors, but the most commercially available is the CMOS image sensor, which can be combined with a camera and mobile device.”
To read the full White Paper, please click the link here.
