The Lost City of the Monkey God & The Most important Sensor

The book club I'm a member of is thick with physicians. They were really enamored with the medical implications of the trip to the jungle highlighted in the book. You don't want  Leishmaniasis -- really you don't.

But this book had a very interesting description of LiDAR and why it was important for exploration. The importance and value of a point cloud. 

Microvision will make it inexpensive and everywhere.... "mid-range LiDar."


CBS This morning -- Lost City


Microvision Twitter

SemiEngineering.com

Reality check
Put in perspective, LiDAR is an well-known technology that has finally found a lucrative market application.

“The principle of LiDAR – the light sent through the pulse and echo of time-of-flight – has not really changed,” said one industry source. “The physics have not changed ever since its invention, for the past 40 years or so. The evolving changes are more in the components and system integration. There’s no fundamental principle change.”

Flash LiDAR has been in development for the past five years, the source noted, likening it to a CMOS image sensor. “This is an area to watch for—the flash LiDAR technology. It promises a very low cost of solution, not necessarily high performance.”

Kevin Watson, senior director of product engineering at Redmond, Wash.-based MicroVision, a publicly held company, disagrees. “I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere,” he said of flash LiDAR. “For many years, the Holy Grail of LiDAR sensors we thought to be a MEMS mirror-based laser scanner, because they’re super-small, relatively inexpensive to manufacture in great quantity, and very reliable. They’re small enough to hide several around an automobile.”

Watson calls LiDAR “the most important sensor” in automotive electronics. “Vision systems are great, but they’re a totally passive system. LiDAR is active.”

But LiDAR also has its limitations. Radar can recognize a wall and has a longer range and it also works in fog, while LiDAR and vision can be confounded. Achieving Level 4 autonomy, the next-to-highest level, is “a ways off,” said Watson, adding that may not be realized for a decade. “It’s a very, very tough problem. It’s just a lot of work.”

Sense: PSE-0403Li-101 3D Sensing Mid-Range LiDAR Engine

To showcase how our PicoP® scanning technology can be applied as a 3D sensor, we’ll be running a demo of our mid-range LiDAR prototype. The demonstration is a development system with some of the capabilities we plan for our commercial engine, of which we expect to ship samples in the second half of this year. Benefits of this cost effective sensing engine include small size, high resolution, low power, dynamic programming of resolution and frame rate to suit applications needs, and low persistence.