Lidar Makers Target Proactive Safety As Automated Driving Remains On The Horizon

So-called advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) could prove to be the real beneficiary as widespread adoption of robotaxis and other automated vehicles (AVs) remain stuck in small scale pilot programs around the world. While engineers continue to work on AVs and the supporting technologies to remove the human driver, those bits and pieces are finding their way into the vehicles we will be buying in the coming years. At next week’s IAA Mobility show in Munich, Germany, Luminar will be demonstrating how its high-performance lidar sensors can be utilized for ADAS to make roads safer.

There are already several vehicles going on sale this year that are utilizing lidar sensors for ADAS with more expected in 2022 and beyond. Honda is selling a limited number Legend sedans in Japan with a level 3 conditionally automated system that utilized five Valeo Scala lidar sensors. Mercedes-Benz is also using one of those sensors for its L3 Drive Pilot on the new S-Class and EQS launching later this year in Germany while Xpeng’s new P5 sedan uses a pair of Livox sensors and Toyota is using a Denso lidar on its hands-free Teammate system. 

However, all of those L2 and L3 systems that allow the driver take their hands off the steering wheel under certain driving conditions are actually convenience features rather than strictly focused on enhancing safety. Luminar’s focus is on the latter as CEO Austin Russell has been promoting the concept of proactive safety. Unlike airbags and seatbelts that are reactive by helping to protect vehicle occupants after an impact, proactive safety involves trying to prevent crashes in the first place. 

Early active safety systems included anti-lock brakes, traction control and stability control, all of which were designed to help the driver maintain control and make the vehicle respond in the way the driver intended. Those systems had limited ability to perceive the environment using wheel speed sensors, accelerometers, yaw rate and other data about what the driver was requesting and how the vehicle was responding to the road conditions. 

Modern ADAS takes this a step further with cameras, radar and now lidar that can “see” away from the interface between the tires and the road. Cameras and increasingly radar have become ubiquitous on mainstream vehicles in the past five years but they have significant limitations. In most cases, vehicles have just one forward facing camera which means they can classify objects, but they have to rely on inherently problematic machine learning approaches to guess how far away objects are. As an active sensor, radar is better, but current low cost radar sensors have very low resolution and limited ability to distinguish different targets. New imaging radar sensors are much better and should start arriving in some vehicles by the end of 2021. 

Lidar is also an active sensor, sending out its own light pulses and measuring the reflections with much higher resolution than even the best imaging radar. Luminar will be demonstrating a Lexus

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RX equipped with its Hydra lidar sensors for pedestrian detection and automatic emergency braking (AEB). In a video published by the company, it can be seen alongside a Tesla

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Model X approaching “walking” pedestrian mannequins. While the Tesla can be seen braking, the response always comes too late to avoid striking the pedestrians. The Luminar-equipped Lexus stops short before impact every time. 

Lidar can provide more accurate distance measurements than a single camera or even the tri-focal system used by Tesla where the three cameras are clustered together above the rear view mirror. Accurate distance measurements with cameras requires spreading cameras apart to achieve parallax. Subaru’s EyeSight system does this but the detection distance is limited by the cameras only being about 12 feet apart. Companies like Light are developing multi-view camera systems with the cameras mounted near the A-pillars that are claimed to provide accurate distance measurements out to 1,000 m. This type of camera installation is visible in the rendering of the Inalfa rooftop integration.

Luminar has developed its own perception software to power this pedestrian detection and AEB system. It is also working with tier one suppliers Webasto and Inalfa to integrate its production-intent Iris sensor which is much slimmer than the Hydra that is used for development purposes. The first application of the Iris will come in the 2022 replacement for the current Volvo XC90. While Volvo plans to eventually enhance the capabilities of its Luminar equipped system to enable highway automated driving, it will include this sort of proactive safety capability from launch. 

Luminar isn’t the only lidar vendor targeting these sorts of applications. European regulators are upgrading the standards for the European New Car Assessment Program (EuroNCAP) for 2023 and plan to include performance tests of AEB, pedestrian detection and other features in environments beyond daylight. Companies like Continental and Ibeo are launching low-cost flash lidar sensors. These don’t have the same ultimate performance of sensors like Luminar, Aeye and others, but they should provide a significant boost over current monovision camera and radar configurations. Combining all three and potentially others like near infrared or thermal imaging cameras can provide even more roboust and reliable sensing in all weather and lighting conditions.

Luminar hopes to get its Iris sensors into high-volume proactive safety systems within the next 3-4 years as vehicle development programs now kicking off come to market. As production scale starts to reach into the millions of units per year, these systems are likely cost just a few hundred dollars.