I believe many people have written in elementary school essays: In the distant year of 2020, cars will have flown into the sky and drivers will no longer be needed to drive...
But , the "distant year 2020" has already arrived before our eyes. It seems that the dreamed flying car has not yet come true, but autonomous driving is indeed getting closer to us. At the CES show in the United States that opened today, Bosch not only unveiled its first automotive-grade lidar, but also announced that it has entered the mass production development stage.
Coincidentally, in addition to Bosch, manufacturers such as Innoviz Technologies and Quanergy Systems have reported that they will realize mass production applications of lidar in the near future. And we always hear the assertion that lidar is the “right-hand arm” of autonomous driving technology, so what exactly is it, and why does the burden of realizing autonomous driving fall on it?
Why choose lidar?
In April 2019, Musk publicly stated: "Only fools use lidar. Anyone who wants to rely on lidar now is doomed!" Indeed, the theory that "lidar is useless" may be too much. Extreme, but after all, Waymo, the leading autonomous driving company, has a lidar that costs up to US$70,000, which is a bit exaggerated for a businessman who needs to frantically reduce costs to enter the Chinese market.
So why is it that with such a high-cost lidar, some people are still obsessed with this "hard nut", and there are even new technologies and start-up companies that are constantly "flying into the flames"? The reason is that lidar has existing vehicle detection methods such as vehicle radar/millimeter wave radar/camera, all of which have performance disadvantages that cannot be ignored.
In contrast, lidar has higher distance resolution, angular resolution, and velocity resolution than other detection methods; the overall detection accuracy is higher, the distance is wider, and it has stronger anti-interference ability than the former (Lu (good stickiness), it can generate multi-bit images more intuitively. The most critical point is that whether lidar is day or night, external lighting conditions have little impact on its own imaging, and it plays a crucial role in achieving higher-level autonomous driving.
Once lidar reaches the conditions for mass production and commercialization, the demand for vehicle mounting will be a huge cake. Whoever can enter the game first will have the right to speak in the pairing.
Main types of lidar
Lidar is divided into two types: single line number and multi-line number. However, single line number can often only perform plane scanning, which is not suitable for the complex driving conditions of cars. environment. Therefore, multi-line laser radar is used in automobiles. Compared with single-line laser radar, the dimension is improved. There are already 4-line, 8-line, 16-line, 32-line, and 64-line laser radars in the current international market, and even some leading companies have already Launched 128 lines of products.
The above types are classified according to the number of lines. Among multi-line lidar products, according to different scanning methods, they are also divided into mechanical rotary, MEMS, FLASH and phased array laser radars.
Among them, the traditional mechanical rotary type is the earliest type of lidar and is currently the most mature type. However, this kind of mechanical rotating lidar also has disadvantages that cannot be ignored. Since the internal core contains complex and precise components such as lasers, scanners, optical components, photodetectors, receiving ICs, and position and navigation devices, the overall hardware cost is high. However, the threshold for mass production is high. Many companies currently developing lidar have abandoned this type and switched to solid-state lidar.
The so-called solid-state lidar is a non-traditional mechanical rotating lidar type, which are MEMS, FLASH and phased array. Among the three, the most popular is MEMS. This system can replace the scanning mechanism used to scan near-infrared lasers, thereby reducing costs.
Moreover, it can dynamically adjust its own scanning mode to focus on special objects, collect detailed information of farther and smaller objects, and identify them. This is something that traditional mechanical lidar cannot achieve, and it is also one of the necessary capabilities to handle complex driving conditions. one.
This system can guide fixed laser beams in different directions through a small reflector. Due to the small mass and volume of the reflector, the overall inertia is not large, and it can move quickly and respond quickly. has been further improved.
The phased array principle is used to implement solid-state laser radar, which completely cancels the mechanical structure and is equipped with a row of transmitters that can change the emission direction of the laser beam by adjusting the relative phase of the signal. It uses electrical signals to The phase is strictly controlled to achieve beam pointing scanning, so it can also be called electronic scanning technology. However, this method is easy to form side lobes, which affects the beam distance and angular resolution, and most of them only stay in the laboratory stage.
The last one is FLASH lidar. The solid-state lidar of 3D? Flash technology is a non-scanning radar. The laser beam it emits will diffuse directly in all directions and illuminate the scene through flash. The advantage is that it avoids derivative problems caused by the movement of the target or lidar during the scanning process. However, the detection range of this kind of lidar is relatively short, because if the detection distance is expanded, the pixels will naturally become larger, and the signals that need to be processed will increase. When a large number of pixels are crammed into the photodetector, the accuracy will gradually decrease.
In general, in view of factors such as cost, stability, accuracy, and matching of driving usage scenarios, solid-state lidar is currently the main research and development direction of various companies. Among them, MEMS is a cost-effective solution. Therefore, this form may become the main product of vehicle-mounted lidar in the future.
“Disputes” between domestic and foreign companies
When it comes to lidar, we have to mention Velodyne, the world’s largest lidar supplier and the first to enter the field of lidar. "forerunner". This all goes back to 2006, when the Chinese automobile market was still in its initial development stage. David Hall, the founder of Velodyne, had already mastered the patent for multi-beam lidar sensors.
The following year, in the autonomous driving challenge held by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 5 of the total 6 finishing models were equipped with Velodyne's lidar technology. Since then, Velodyne has become famous and once became the leading company and synonym for lidar.
Subsequently, Velodyne developed rapidly and became the top supplier in its own field, and continued to improve its mechanical scanning radar. Affected by Moore's Law, the company's products have been rapidly upgraded. Combined with its own technology, in 2017 it has launched a lidar with up to 128 lines. But similarly, the price does not strictly follow Moore's Law, because the retail price of this product is already as high as 700,000 yuan. Integrating the above mentioned, mechanical lidar is expensive. Although the technology has reached its peak and can be mounted on vehicle models, the integration center that needs to process a large amount of data is difficult to shrink and takes up a lot of space in the vehicle, which has become a "disease" of VLS-128. Coupled with the continuous growth of solid-state lidar, VLS-128 (128-line lidar) can only become Velodyne's showpiece.
Velodyne, which has almost fallen behind in solid-state radar due to high costs, has also experienced a rise in domestic lidar start-ups in recent years. The most representative ones are Hesai Technology and Sagitar Juchuang.
The latter is mainly 16-line and 32-line products. Based on local advantages and relatively cheap labor costs, the benchmark products are only half of Velodyne. It is worth mentioning that just a few days ago, when Velodyne announced the abolition of its China office, Sagitar Jutron released a 125-line solid-state lidar with a retail price of only US$1,898.
On the other hand, domestic Baidu used to be Velodyne’s “financier father”, and Velodyne, which just launched solid-state lidar in 2018, was obviously not satisfactory. After that, Baidu turned to Hesai Technology and used the Apollo platform. Develop autonomous driving technology.
Having been eroded away by domestic start-ups, Velodyne officially filed a lawsuit against domestic Hesai Technology and Sagitar Juchuang in mid-2018, claiming that the two companies had infringed on US patent number 7969558 owned by Velodyne. The patent also officially marks that domestic and foreign lidar has entered a stage of fierce competition.
When will it enter thousands of households?
Having said all that, when will lidar begin mass production? Its mass production means that the autonomous driving function will take a historic step forward, and it will be one step closer to realizing the "dream" in the composition.
Once upon a time, five years ago, industry insiders’ predictions for L3 and L3 mass production were generally concentrated around 2022 to 2023. Recent predictions for this goal are more conservative, and the time has been extended to after 2025. The main reason is that the popularity of lidar is still far slower than people's judgment.
Regarding the mass production of lidar, in addition to Bosch announcing that its first car-grade long-distance lidar has entered the mass production development stage, Israeli manufacturer Innoviz Technologies also announced that its second-generation lidar Samples of the product have been delivered in the summer of 2019, and formal mass production is planned for 2020.
In addition, Quanergy Systems of the United States also plans to install lidar on mass-produced models in 2021; Pioneer Electronics of Japan's Pioneer Company is more conservative and is expected to install it on local buses in 2020. on special purpose vehicles.
It can be seen that if the plan goes ahead as scheduled, lidar will be mass-produced as soon as this year. By then, you and I will become witnesses of the automotive industry completing a step that spans an era.
This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.