- The world’s largest Lidar manufacturer has just unveiled its next-generation technology
- The system can detect color, speed and reflectivity
- The technology is expected to hit the market later this year
The world’s largest maker of Lidar sensors has just announced a next-generation version of its technology that should give self-driving cars a huge reliability boost.
Hesai Group announced this week that its new color Lidar, called “6D ETX color platform”, is capable of detecting an object’s X, Y and Z coordinates, as well as its reflectivity, speed and color, according to the South China Morning Post.
Compared to the black-and-white imagery currently returned by most systems on the market, Hesai Group’s ability to detect color, as well as any reflectivity and speed, is expected to significantly improve the speed at which autonomous driving systems can determine and categorize objects, such as road signs, traffic lights and emergency service vehicles.
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Hesai CEO David Li Yifan says the first iterations of the technology will hit the market later this year, saying they will be the first of their kind. However, the CEO did not reveal which brands would receive the Lidar system first.
“This is not some kind of hype,” he said at a press briefing on Friday. “This is a fundamental innovation, something no one I know of has ever done before,” the South China Morning Post reported.
Deutsche Bank conducted its own study on this technology, in which it concluded that it eliminated the need for “complex seams or inferences”, meaning that the autonomous driving system no longer needed to “guess” when identifying critical colored objects such as traffic lights, lane lines or building signs.
He reported that Hesai’s innovation would “significantly improve” the spatial intelligence of global artificial intelligence models, likely putting a spotlight on the already profitable company that counts China’s 10 largest automakers among its clients.
Analysis: autonomy without intervention is coming
Most major automotive players in China are working to develop a Level 3 autonomous driving system, which will allow drivers to perform “secondary tasks” safely and legally while behind the wheel.
Currently, Level 3 pilot operations have started on designated urban roads in Chongqing, southwest China, and highways in Beijing, with more approvals expected to follow.
Tesla is also actively testing and rolling out its supervised fully autonomous driving system in China, but it is notorious for eschewing Lidar and other sensors in favor of pursuing its camera-only approach, which it claims will significantly reduce overall cost.
But many Tesla owners are unhappy that the company is promising self-driving capabilities on older vehicles, while it continues to deploy higher levels of processing power in its new products.
China’s efforts to develop a more advanced Lidar system could help improve the accuracy, as well as the speed with which a reliable autonomous driving system can be approved by authorities.
Additionally, it is highly likely that China will continue to support cutting-edge technologies from its domestic market, rather than letting a company like Tesla become the first to bring a true “hands-off” autonomous driving system to market.
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