Transportation

Plus Commits To Ouster’s Digital LiDAR For Autonomous Trucks


We have come a long way since the 2008 DARPA Grand Challenge ignited intense public and corporate interest in autonomous cars. The decade after has seen significant investments and technological progress in autonomous vehicle technology, the underlying sensing technologies like LiDAR, cameras, radar, and GNSS that make it possible, and exponential advances in computing power and artificial intelligence.

The original focus of the Grand Challenge was for the autonomy of cars (the underlying objective was autonomous military vehicles). Later efforts by Google

GOOG
(and Waymo), Zoox, GM-Cruise, Uber

UBER
, Aurora, and others continued the focus on autonomous cars for personal transportation. However, many in the trucking business realized the potential of autonomous trucking for solving issues like fuel efficiency, safety, driver health, capital efficiency, and cost savings. Ever since Otto (later acquired by Uber) made the first autonomous trucking run on a Colorado highway to transport cans of beer, significant financial investments have been made in the trucking autonomy space. In general, autonomous trucking seeks to operate on the highway with well-mapped routes, without the complexity of urban traffic, pedestrians, and dense traffic. LiDAR is a critical part of the perception and mapping sensing suite and has location, mounting, performance, and reliability requirements that are unique to large Class 8 trucks.  

Plus, a leading autonomous trucking company recently announced an initial  LiDAR order (2000 units) with Ouster.  Higher volumes are planned as it equips thousands of trucks with its ADS (Autonomous Driving System) for deployments across the United States, China, and Europe over the next 5 years. Ouster’s LiDAR is an important part of the ADS. To date, this is the largest public announcement of a LiDAR purchase in the trucking space and signals the maturity of autonomous trucking and LiDAR technology.

Plus was founded in 2016 and recently raised $200M in additional funding (since inception, the company has raised close to $400M). It has strong relationships with truck manufacturers and logistics players in China and the United States and has been testing its ADS hardware and software stacks with these partners over the past 3 years. The success of these trials has resulted in significant demand for the ADS product. According to Shawn Kerrigan, COO, and co-founder: “It is exciting for Plus to move beyond trials into actual deployments on a large scale across diverse geographies now”. Level 4 ADS products will be deployed starting this year (Level 4 autonomy implies complete autonomy within specific ODDs or Operational Design Domains) with human drivers on board (supervised Level 4). Supervised L4 ADS delivers immediate benefits in terms of reducing driver fatigue and improving driver retention and safety. It also creates economic benefits in the form of significant fuel savings.  Mr. Kerrigan states that “fuel consumption can vary by about 30% across different drivers, and Plus’s supervised L4 solution can improve this on average by 15% by using optimal speeds, lane changes, and braking maneuvers”.  Deployment at scale is also important since it generates revenues, provides product experience, and enables Plus to collect billions of miles of driving experience and mapping data across diverse ODDs. This provides a graceful bridge to a transition to unsupervised L4 operation in the future.

Ouster’s LiDAR was attractive to Plus for multiple reasons – the ability to scale to high volumes now, the superior perception performance at shorter ranges, and the high level of reliability and durability demanded in trucking environments. Ouster promotes its “digital LiDAR” which it claims is a simple construction with a minimal number of parts, like in digital cameras. It uses a combination of VCSELs (Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers) and SPADs (Single Photon Avalanche Photodiodes) that are mounted on a rotating non-contact slip ring mechanism to provide 360° surround-view LiDAR. The VCSEL-SPAD based architecture operates at a wavelength of 865 nm wavelength and uses Gallium Arsenide (VCSELs) and silicon CMOS (SPADs) – material systems used extensively in conventional electronics and hence scalable at attractive costs. The VCSEL-SPAD architecture is also used in the Apple iPhone 12, although with a significantly lower range and resolution performance. Ouster was founded in 2015 and has raised upward of $200M to date. It recently announced plans to go public via a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) merger with Colonnade Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: CLA), providing even more working capital for product development and scaling. It is valued in the multi-billion-dollar range and reported 2020 revenues of ~$20M across multiple markets (mining, smart infrastructure, automotive, and industrial automation). The deal with Plus will boost this significantly over the next 5 years. Ouster has relationships in place with large contract manufacturers like Benchmark to ramp to high volume production of its products to meet Plus’s volume, timing, and quality requirements.

According to Angus Pacala, the CEO of Ouster, “The key to rapid and efficient production scalability at economical price points is our dramatically simpler lidar design, with just two chips and two lenses. Ouster’s digital lidar delivers the reliability that is critical for trucking and other vehicles”. Additionally, “the similarity between the optics and electronics of the iPhone 12 and Ouster’s LiDAR further demonstrates the scalability and reliability of the digital LiDAR approach”.

My Take: This partnership is great news for Plus and Ouster – in terms of imminent practical deployment and production scale-up of the ADS and LiDAR. The Ouster LiDAR likely deployed under the truck rearview mirrors (in Figure 3) is the mid-range version (OS1-128) – for surround-view performance at the shorter ranges (0-100 m).  Based on the pricing analysis of LiDARs across different suppliers and performance levels, the OS1 price range at these volumes is estimated at $2,000/unit, with $1,000 pricing projected at higher volumes.

In general, there is also a need for a long-range, forward-looking LiDAR (250 m range over a narrower horizontal Field of View).  Such LiDARs are typically based on a 15XX nm wavelength (pioneered by other LiDAR players like Princeton Lightwave-Argo, Luminar, Aeye, and others) that relies on more exotic, expensive, and difficult to scale material systems like Indium Phosphide.   Plus is likely assessing or using other sources for the long-range LiDAR, although the volume scalability, maturity, and costs of such sensors still lag behind 8XX-9XX nm LiDAR.   For the immediate future, as Plus deploys supervised L4, the shorter-range solution may be adequate. As the transition to unsupervised L4 occurs in the future (for cars and trucks) and advances are made in the maturity of long-range LiDARs, it is expected that these will also be deployed at scale, although at higher price points.



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