If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.
One big hump for self-driving-car developers to get over is the implementation of a lidar system. Waymo solved it by bringing construction in-house, and GM just solved it by buying a lidar company.
General Motors on Monday announced its acquisition of Strobe, a sensor-tech firm that works on lidar. Strobe’s engineering team will join the self-driving wizards at Cruise Automation, another firm that GM acquired in its efforts to build a mass-produced self-driving car.
This image from Cruise Automation’s Medium post shows an early version of Strobe’s lidar emitter.
“Strobe’s lidar technology will significantly improve the cost and capabilities of our vehicles so that we can more quickly accomplish our mission to deploy driverless vehicles at scale,” said Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise Automation, in a statement. Vogt went into greater detail in a Medium post discussing the benefits of lidar in self-driving cars.
Lidar is complicated, and with that complexity comes cost. Velodyne, a major lidar manufacturer, has a flagship model that costs nearly $80,000 per unit. There are smaller, cheaper units on offer, but they don’t provide the same range and detail, which can affect how well and how quickly self-driving cars are able to “process” the world around them.
Waymo took a different route, choosing to develop and implement its own in-house lidar solution, as opposed to signing up with a vendor like Velodyne — although Google originally used Velodyne products before it decided to in-house the whole thing. Tesla, on the other hand, appears to have no interest in using lidar. The company believes it can produce Level 5 self-driving vehicles without it.
