[HN Gopher] Laser Bear Honeycomb lidar
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Laser Bear Honeycomb lidar
Author : verdverm
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-03-29 21:39 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (waymo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (waymo.com)
| Jabbles wrote:
| Who do you think their largest customers will be?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Even Google writes "everyday" as a noun, now. Sigh.
|
| (Clue:
|
| "everyday": adjective; ordinary.
|
| "every day": noun phrase; all days.)
|
| Anyway, Google marketing dept does. Or did, one may hope.
| kevmo wrote:
| Microvision is bad at PR, but they appear to be winning here.
|
| https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/microvision-inc.-announ...
| blackguardx wrote:
| 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.
| fnord77 wrote:
| I like how the MVIS stock spiked to almost 1000 twenty years
| ago, then cratered to a penny stock until it got pumped
| recently.
| kjksf wrote:
| SpaceX: you want to launch a satellite into space? Here's how
| much it costs and here's a web page to order a ride-sharing
| mission.
|
| Waymo: want to buy a lidar from us? Tell us about yourself...
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Tell us about yourself.
|
| Cultural DNA is hard to shake.
| klintcho wrote:
| 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.
| ra7 wrote:
| I imagine they do it because they don't want to sell to a
| competitor.
| monkmartinez wrote:
| Needless friction. A competitor is going to get one if they
| really want it.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| The ride-share is available at https://waymo.com/waymo-one/
|
| (SpaceX doesn't sell their rocket parts.)
| Judgmentality wrote:
| That's still an apply-to-be-accepted beta program, not
| something the public can actually use/purchase.
| polishTar wrote:
| Not anymore. As of a couple months ago it's been opened up.
| anyone (in the service area) can use it.
|
| Relevant blog post: https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/waymo-
| is-opening-its-fully-dr...
| crazysim wrote:
| You can just show up (or fake being) in the geofence, open
| up the app, and you can sign up immediately.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| 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.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| 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.
| tw04 wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| I can't believe I can actually enter my credit card number and
| pay for a $1M+ rocket launch payload right now.
| [deleted]
| porphyra wrote:
| 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.
| cup_of_joe wrote:
| The naming for this product sounds like the marketing dept. just
| concatenated the most popular options from a word cloud
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Minimum range 0. Maximum range?
| verdverm wrote:
| 500 meters or greater most likely, based on what Waymo equipped
| vehicle specs say
| porphyra wrote:
| The big Waymo lidar on top of the cars, which is not for
| sale, can hit 300 m range.
|
| The small Laser Bear Honeycombs around the periphery can only
| see about 10 m.
| coder543 wrote:
| 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.
| verdverm wrote:
| Their forward facing on vehicle 5th gen claim is 500m, from
| about 1 year ago.
|
| The lack of number on the webpage does leave one to
| speculate based on other sources...
| fastball wrote:
| Yep but the forward facing on Waymo vehicles is not the
| Laser Bear Honeycomb.
| [deleted]
| mvzvm wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| pastullo wrote:
| 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.
| clapper wrote:
| There's an awful lot of hiring for a peripheral merchant.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| 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.
| bengale wrote:
| Seems more like a better way to gather information on larger
| projects working with similar hardware.
| Firerouge wrote:
| 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.
| shusson wrote:
| > minimum order size listed is <100
|
| not to mention they don't even specify how you can power or
| connect to the sensor.
| azernik wrote:
| Usually that's in the datasheet they send during initial
| negotiations.
| jonas21 wrote:
| If you have one of the new iPhones with lidar, there are a few
| apps (like Scaniverse [1]) that can generate dense point clouds
| and textured meshes.
|
| [1] https://scaniverse.com
| dogma1138 wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| 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
| 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.
| dljsjr wrote:
| 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.
| verdverm wrote:
| The latest Azure Kinect has a megapixel depth sensor, costd
| $400 iirc
|
| Video is 4 MP
|
| lots of nice open source to go with it these days
| stcredzero wrote:
| 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| 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.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _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.
| robbiep wrote:
| 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
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| Is this how they gonna wind down Waymo?
| ncallaway wrote:
| Maybe. It never hurts to be the one selling boots and shovels
| in a gold rush, though.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bostonpete wrote:
| This is 2 years old, right...?
| https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/06/waymo-is-selling-lidar-se...
| vitus wrote:
| Signs point to yes:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190308225112/https://waymo.com...
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