The Ouster OS0 and Hesai PandarQT are generally much better choices since they...
* match the field of view of the Laser Bear Honeycomb (OS0: 360 x 90 deg; PandarQT: 360 x 104 deg; Waymo: 360 x 95 deg)
* produce 10x as many points per second
* are available for sale to customers who wish to use them in autonomous vehicles
* have no external moving parts that are liable to get gunked up with wet leaves
* have longer range
Although the main drawbacks are that the Ouster OS0 has only single return and the Hesai PandarQT has dual returns, compared to the Laser Bear Honeycomb's several returns.
If the laser passes through some semitransparent things like glass, rain, and perhaps a fine wire mesh, multiple returns would give you the range measurements for each of the things that the beam passes through.
So this has got to be prohibitively expensive for home gamers if the request for information form's minimum order size listed is <100.
Is there anything comparable for hobby project lidar scanning? Not necessarily wide angle, since you can always use a turntable, but capable of generating moderately dense point clouds.
Typically the LIDARs that are on autonomous vehicles are pretty low "resolution" compared to smaller LIDAR packages like a Hokuyo or depth sensors like a Kinect. It wouldn't be good for fine detail scanning.
Azure Kinect isn't great at resolution, either. Its depth sensor is an embarrassingly small VGA resolution, which sucks for realtime photogrammetry. Point cloud scenes look like sludge.
Are there any "real time" depth sensors with high spatial and sensor resolution?
I've been looking at FGPA-based solutions like Nerian Scarlett, and this seems to be closer to what I want [1], but still not quite good enough.
The reason I put resolution in quotes is that I wasn't referring to the image/buffer resolution but rather the ability to resolve fine details.
For example, Hokuyo LIDARs can resolve details w/ ~millimeter resolution at close range (less than 10m). Another way to think about it is if you want to map your point cloud as a set of voxels in an octree, the smallest voxel is about 1m x 1m x 1m.
Conversely, large LIDARs for vehicles like Ibeo and Velodyne and such typically map things with a resolution in the range of centimeters or larger. When you're looking for large things like other vehicles, people, obstacles, etc. then you can make those tradeoffs in the sensor design and fall back on things like vision for small feature detection in a more cost effective way.
I personally can’t wait till iPhone sensors come on a package that can be easily connected to a Pi or a Jetson these will leak into the generic supply chain in 1-2 refreshes.
Hope so but this depends on how patent encumbered they are, right?
Like maybe you can just buy the part off Aliexpress but if no one is willing to put it onto a breakout board, let alone into a product, that's less broadly useful.
Chinese companies don’t care much for patents, you already have things like the HQ Pi camera with a decent Sony sensor simply because those are now more readily available.
I don’t think the module itself is protected by patents that would prevent breakout boards especially from Chinese companies, you can buy replacement parts that Apple claims are counterfeit but in reality they are identical to the originals because they come from the same supplier just not from the same supply chain.
The only question is how easy would it be to connect those sensors and make use of them if a lot of the logic that is required to drive them is buried in the Ax SoC from Apple it would be difficult if they use a rather standard protocol then it would rather simple.
You can buy Apple SoCs in bulk if you know where to look.
Same goes for touchid and faceid sensors you may have issues with the Apple “genuine hardware” checks so some features would not work but most repair shops have the reset toolkit already which somewhat bypasses that.
Patents protect someone from copying your invention, these parts come from the same suppliers but are manufactured during ghost shifts, skimmed from the main shifts or are rejects that failed to meet Apple’s standards but are still mostly functional (it’s also not uncommon to mark functioning parts as rejects to skim off the top).
I don’t think people realize just how fishy the supply chain in China is even for big players.
In my (coworker's) experience with this sensor, they don't send a datasheet or give any specs on power, but they will replace your demo unit when you ruin your first one by trying to power it with PoE.
Everyone is complaining about hiding pricing. Hiding pricing is standard practice for most electronic components that you would integrate into an electronics project. It's a method of select customers that won't need a lot of support or will give the volume that makes it worthwhile.
Pretty much, yeah. At my hardware-focused corp, we have specific supply chain people that will argue about price all day. It's just a different business world than retail.
The entire waymo website including the lidar page has been revamped right after this discussion. In case anyone want to revisit the cool new site http://waymo.com/lidar
Velodyne LiDAR sensors are 200m or less, it seems, so I highly doubt Waymo has a 500m sensor in this form factor.
Glancing at articles from when this Waymo product was originally announced a couple of years ago, I saw some equally unhelpful speculation of “no more than 50 feet.”
If it was 500 meters, surely they would say, because that would be really good.
Even so, Microvision is better at PR than they are at making products! I suspect this is a dying gasp to bump up their stock price. They barely have any engineers after their last layoff.
One of the mods in their subreddit willingly bought and tore apart a Microsoft Hololens to prove that it was using Microvision's products [1]. It happened at the time of the mass COVID scare, but I think it got its resurgence from the latest EV push / GME squeeze.
On the same note: I love the saying that comes up here and other places sometimes "if SpaceX can have pricing on their launches, your SaaS product can provide a pricing section".
If I can't afford it, i'm not of interest to you anyway, if I can afford it, why not give it to me ? Only time I can understand it if you have something highly customized which will greatly affect the price, if not just give it to me.
I don't want to defend hiding the price too vehemently, but we should be fair here: there is a difference between "I cannot afford that", and "I'm not psychologically ready to agree to pay that" -- at the end there is an implied ", yet".
Hiding the price means a customer can't see a number and compare it against a competitor in a drive-by fashion. It means the customer has to self-vet to the stage of interest where they'll spend the time to fill in a form. It means that there is a high likelihood you'll get to have a conversation with them, which will hopefully stick with them even if they decide not to buy because of price. It means that if they decide not to buy, you're likely to hear about why. It means you can tailor your sales message to them. It means you can empathize with them and try to better understand whether your product will fit them, maybe what you need your team to build before they would be a good sale. And so on.
It's a very, very reasonable and sound tactic. I also don't like encountering it when I just want to know about something's cost, but it's not done for nothing.
If there is no pricing page then it's expensive. Pricing is the first page I jump too when comparing services / products. The ones without them don't get considered.
it also allows them to evaluate whether you are going to be an annoyance as a customer and require untennable amounts of support when buying what is still something of a prototype.
> Hiding the price means a customer can't see a number and compare it against a competitor in a drive-by fashion.
It means they can't compare at all without giving away valuable information.
> It's a very, very reasonable and sound tactic.
No it isn't. It's a tactic used my sales weasels to gain leads. You a paying with your private info for the opportunity to see a price that's usually custom to you based on how much they think you can pay.
> No it isn't. It's a tactic used my sales weasels to gain leads.
Thanks for the broad assertion, and your weasel words! :)
Your point that it's used by bad people is valid -- I agree with you. There's a lot of bad stuff about the tactic of not revealing price, and certainly a lot of bad actors out there who will use it to eke out the best price they can, or for numerous other bad reasons.
Unfortunately for your argument, you can't really assert the negative here: that no one could hide the price for a good reason, because you can't know 'em all. There are good reasons, as I outlined, and there are people who've chosen not to display their price for reasons among the ones I listed. I know some of them, multiple firms, and I know intimately that these firms do not e.g. change their prices depending on who they're talking to. Some places might! But these ones don't.
Often they're early businesses proving themselves or new products out. They want to focus on leads who've expressed a clear signal of intent, price isn't the strongest selling point of their product, and they want their great product to shine in the areas where it is most competitive.
Price is not always what matters most to a buyer, especially an institutional or commercial buyer, but people are strange about money. Upon seeing a $100 difference on a thousand dollar purchase, someone might choose the cheaper product because they think it's a "better deal" without having ever investigated both fully. If they'd looked a little deeper, maybe the higher cost thing had a far higher value? It can sometimes be hard to articulate that value without digging in a little, or learning about someone's problems. But haggling on price is a little bit like bike shedding -- it's simple: lower is better, so it's easy to focus on.
So as I said, it's a reasonable tactic for some firms. They aren't necessarily hucksters, they're just rational people doing what they can to compete. Maybe someday price will be an attractive part of the sales strategy, but... today it's not, so it takes a back seat.
> They want to focus on leads who've expressed a clear signal of intent...
Let’s not try to wrap it up and put a ribbon on it.
This is for generating sales leads for sales people/automation to attempt to get sales.
That’s it.
You can try to justify it, but bluntly, since there’s no way to control how your information is distributed after you release it, you are only in a lose position as a customer from engaging with this.
You will either a) be ignored, b) taken advantage of or c) have your data passed on for other people to take advantage of.
As a customer, there is no reason for you to engage with this: you get less than nothing from it.
The only benefit is for the company, and fair enough, that’s their job.
...but as a customer, I think you’re entitled to say: I’d rather not do business with you under the circumstances if that’s how you treat customers.
I respect the time you put into your response, but I don't agree. I do agree there are bad actors, but I just don't think it's a categorical matter.
Doing b2b sales can be difficult, and the lowest price just isn't job one in a lot of situations as long as it's reasonable. I get that this tactic is annoying, and that businesses can take advantage -- but that's true of almost any situation.
I think any reasonable person running a business, especially a b2b one, would consider using tactics like this, and not necessarily out of any malice. Put yourself in the shoes of a small business with many competitors, and you just can't beat them on price. How do you run with that the best you can?
Google shouldn't necessarily need to worry about that, but they could easily have other legitimate reasons too though, e.g. open supply and development questions, especially given the world today.
Of course though, I wouldn't want to trust Google as far as I could throw them.
The simple reason is that there's an entire enterprise software sales establishment out there that has every incentive to keep things exactly how they are. Individual salespeople get fat commissions, sales executives get bonuses, CIOs and other purchasing authorities get (both legal and illegal) kickbacks.
A simple pricing and checkout process would rock this whole ecosystem.
This ^ just ask CIOs about the kickbacks they receive from offshore outsourcing companies in the form of condos purchased by anonymous LLCs and held by “trusts”. Somebodys gotta get a cut of the billions in profits these offshore companies reap.
If you put a price on your website you lose everyone who doesn't want to pay it, and you get that price from everyone else. There is no "perfect" price. You either undercharge on average or you lose some customers because they can't afford it.
If you make people call you can charge each person the exact amount that they are willing to pay.
I'm not saying it is "morally" optimal. But there are a bunch of legitimate reasons to try this strategy.
"If you make people call you can charge each person the exact amount that they are willing to pay."
Not really. You're still going to be the first one throwing out the number. -IF- I call (big if), I'm going to say "Here's what I want to do; how much will that cost". If you come back with "Well, what are you looking to pay", my answer will be to hang up.
In theory posting your prices will have more customers respond since the barrier to adoption is so much lower, and your costs will be lower, since you won't have people calling and taking up personnel time only to realize you're too expensive.
Neither theoretical advantage is a realized advantage.
That article has a huge blindspot. The vast majority of professional software I've come across is in the $1k-50k/year range, ranging from $1k/seat mechanical CAD and other PDL/manufacturing/etc software to $50k/seat silicon design packages. Contracts for the latter may break $100k on a regular basis but many if not most customers for the rest, like the diaspora of subcontractors in automotive, biotech, or the MIC are small to medium sized businesses with annual accounts under $100k.
I would imagine because the hardware itself is borderline useless. There's likely significant integration work and they want to understand how much help you're going to need to integrate it.
Tesla buying the hardware probably just wants a schematic and a part. GM probably wants a crew of 100 engineers to help put it into a car and support it for the duration.
Integrating a satellite on to a launch vehicle on average is, it is fair to say, more than half the work of your entire mission, whatever it may be. Far more work than integrating a lidar sensor into your product. Source: working with both lidar systems and designing a satellite system for launch in university days.
Forget support - just getting a chassis even tested costs an order of magnitude more. For the price of a single five year model refresh and accompanying crash testing, NASA would be able to buy at least a dozen SpaceX launch vehicles or three to five full missions once you include overhead. The average car company will do at least half a dozen of these refreshes every five years like clockwork and you can bet a chassis optimized for LIDAR will have to do the full suite of tests.
There was that famous Amex case in the 80s where through some massive misunderstanding the restaurant (I think) got mixed up using the terminal and accidentally entered the long number for the amount. It being the early days of those terminals, the cardholder didn't notice and accepted it and Amex let it go through as it was one of their no limit cards.
The overnight interest alone was astronomical. Fortunately Amex saw the PR value in being decent and refunded everything.
I'm able to install the Waymo app, log in (disclaimer-I work for the same parent company as Waymo but I'm using my regular old personal email address) and the app appears ready to let me hail a ride. AFAIK it's fully open to the general public.
I'm incredibly suspicious of this. People in /r/selfdrivingcars are all still clamoring for when they can finally try it, including people that live in the area. Besides that, when I google I can't find any recent test drives by the media using Waymo.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. Being able to sign up has been possible for years. The question is can anybody actually hail a ride with Waymo? Because numerous people on r/selfdrivingcars are claiming they can't.
They are indeed available. You can go to Chandler, download the app and hail a ride. There’s nothing suspicious about it and r/selfdrivingcars will tell you it’s possible too.
What happens when you install the app and try to hail a ride (assuming you're in an area where the service is officially available to the general public)?
SpaceX is selling a one-time spot on a rocket. That relationship is measured in days, maybe weeks.
Waymo is selling a product that necessarily involves a long business relationship measured over years or months and significant amounts of collaboration. They're simply doing due diligence, like anyone would before entering into a long-term commitment.
I'm guessing you haven't bought a lot of rocket launches.
Launches are often bought years in advance (although SpaceX is reducing that to months, it's still not days or weeks).
For payloads, they need to be certified for things like ITAR compliance, mass, mass distribution, power/thermal requirements on the pad, deorbit / debris mitigation plans, etc. etc. etc. The launch provider needs to care about all these things, since they'll be on the hook for many of them. It's not a simple relationship.
Almost everything you just described is handled by the launch provider. The working relationship is SpaceX asking their customer a bunch of question so they can provide the basic service being paid for and satisfy the basic compliance legally required of them. It's a complex relationship, but isn't a collaborative relationship.
(I have worked for a SpaceX customer. Unless you actually work for SpaceX or another SpaceX customer, I'm pretty certain I've more experience on this matter than you.)
I co-own a company that is a supplier to both SpaceX and many of their customers. I haven't worked on a launch license myself, but between what my company does and various friends in the industry, I'm familiar enough with the process.
You're right that the relationship between the launch provider and and customer is complex but not particularly collaborative. The GP point is simply that SpaceX doesn't build that complexity into their commercial pricing -- which is awesome. (Their pricing for government customers is much less transparent, precisely because the relationships are MUCH more complex and collaborative).
For Waymo or other LIDAR providers, the relationship with the customer is certainly NOT more inherently complex than the relationship between a launch provider and their customers. They're being opaque about pricing for strategic purposes, which I'll avoid speculating about, since they're also one of my company's customers...
One of Waymo's LIDAR competitors was a client when I still worked in consulting. (Not free to say which due to non-disclosures still in effect.)
You're trivializing the amount of work that has gone into both LIDARs and products integrating LIDARS.
I am aware that rocket science is hard. But we reached the moon before we developed pocket calculators. Fundamentally, the math behind rocket science can be done by hand. And was.
Despite RADAR being developed more than 70 years ago, LIDARs required technological breakthroughs in multiple fields of physical sciences to become viable, which is why they only began showing up in force within the past decade, and this is despite the obvious military applications driving military research for the past several decades.
Waymo has long been considered to be leading the self driving gold rush, and if they themselves are bowing out and selling tech to their competitors then it doesn't paint a rosy picture for the future.
I don't think the two are compatible. For example if running a self-driving taxi service is viable and profitable then Google will be doing everything in its power to corner the market, rather than also selling the tech to Uber & Lyft and competing with them.
"If running a self-driving taxi service is viable"
If is doing a lot of work in that sentence... If it's not profitable (or may not be for a while), then they'd sure like to at least be selling components to others working on the problem.
Poor waymo, having to pivot to selling peripherals it developed ever since dad cut the purse strings. I wonder how this bodes for their long term plan? From what I understand, Alphabet is getting less and less bullish on a lot of these moonshots.
Is it? Waymo seems to be doing pretty well, it has the largest fleet of autonomous cars and from what i remember by far the most extensive testing program on real streets.
This looks more like an attempt to spread the R&D cost on lidar by selling to third parties. I guess as more and more companies sell their lidar solutions, it becomes more of a commodity and less a differentiation factor, like self-driving software for example.
From a purely economic perspective, this is probably a good strategy even if they had a huge budget.
Each component should compete in the market place.
If there are better components out there, your divisions should be able to buy them instead of internally developed ones.
If a competitor can use your components better and build something better, they should etc.
If a competitor can provide better intermediate products using your components, buy them and incorporate them in your system.
You only have to be one of the best at one thing, and you should be the one of the best at a few things, and you could be one of the best at many things.
The moment Sundar became CEO of Alphabet it should have been clear that the whole experiment was a failure. It is probably too much work to dissolve the entity and fold all the moonshots back into Google, but that's effectively how things are running now.
There's one entire category of applications, which is going to drive disruption that's going to obsolete LIDAR. Namely military applications.
Active sensors aren't viable anymore for military applications outside of severely asymmetrical conflicts. Active sensors will advertise their position to seekers and guided ordinance. Passive sensors are going to be required for military autonomy, and military R&D will guarantee these will supplant active sensors like LIDAR.
Let's say that Tesla goes 100% pacifist, and declares that no Tesla technology, like Dojo, will ever be used for military purposes. Just the fact that Tesla FSD had solved computer vision and the fact that Dojo exists will guarantee that someone will replicate those things for military applications.
Active sensors could still become so cheap, however, that they will be used in applications where each unit must be very cheap and therefore can't have the onboard processing for full-blown autonomy AI and computer vision. LIDAR could then be used to reduce unit costs for those super low unit-cost applications. These LIDAR would be much smaller and much lower power than the LIDAR for autonomous cars.
Except that Tesla hasn’t solved computer vision and may never.
Also Dojo isn’t some magical technology. It’s an FPGA platform which we have available today on AWS and hasn’t changed the game for deep learning use cases. It’s just edge optimised.
LiDAR however has changed the game. It works well and costs are rapidly coming down.
Except that Tesla hasn’t solved computer vision and may never.
Want to wager? Have you seen the FSD beta videos? Looks like they've pretty much solved it for autonomous driving. Also my experience when using Tesla FSD with Navigate on Autopilot. It pretty much looks inevitable at this point.
Also Dojo isn’t some magical technology.
The magic, is how they won't have to label manually. It will automate the labelling.
LiDAR however has changed the game. It works well and costs are rapidly coming down.
Just like Scotty Kilmer when he says, "changed the game." Using cameras + AI will leapfrog it for applications like autonomous driving. What will be left, are applications where you can't afford too much processing. I agree with you that LIDAR will get cheap enough for that.
Also, you don't even address my main point about military applications and active sensors. I'm kinda proud of that bit of reasoning.
> Have you seen the FSD beta videos? Looks like they've pretty much solved it for autonomous driving.
Have you? Plenty of videos where it fails pathetically (like https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs). This looks nowhere close to “pretty much solved”. In fact, it’s an active danger to the rider and its surroundings.
Not OP but I think if you were wagering on delivery right now you just can’t make the claim that it is solved for Tesla; maybe they will but they have been saying that for 5 years now and the demos don’t look that different from the video they released 2-3 years ago when it looked to be just around the corner (and before they instituted a program to replace the hardware on all cars even after they said every one has FSD ready hardware)
The military one is interesting... seems like autonomous military vehicles will be massively prone to adversarial attacks and as soon as the line of training is discovered that entire line of hardware suddenly can’t see the mine it’s about to drive over, for example.
I think unless you get to full general AI then you’re still going to need a human in the loop to protect against adversarial attacks for everything but the most mundane cargos, and at that level the difference between LIDAR and CV is probably minimal
The blackmore lidar startup that aurora recently acquired was a spinout from an active sensing defense company. Additionally a lot of the precision guided munitions make heavy use of active sensing. For a lot of military applications they are fine with active sensing because there isn't a concern about people knowing where they are the concern is getting the job done and collecting as much data as possible.
