Luminar’s lidar helps vehicles see farther
Austin Russell jumped in a golf cart and zigzagged through the cavernous open space on San Francisco’s Pier 35, occasionally crossing paths with a man dressed in black pedaling a bike on a random course, mannequins of an adult and child, a couple of tires, orange traffic cones and a string of flags. It seemed like surrealistic performance art. But its purpose was to demonstrate the resolution and range of the lidar sensor developed by Luminar Technologies, the Portola Valley company Russell co-founded five years ago, when he was 17. Lidar, a laser version of radar that senses light, is crucial to most self-driving cars; it’s how they see the world. All the Pier 35 activity and objects, from the moving golf cart to the stationary traffic cones, were visible in high-
definition detail on a large screen inside a Luminar test car.
“I saw a business opportunity to build new lidar ground-up, to meet the needs of an emerging industry,” said Russell, a gangly blond with an engaging grin who filed for his first patent at age 12.
After five years in stealth mode, Luminar, which has raised $36 million in venture capital, is emerging into public view just as the self-driving industry is poised to boom. Major carmakers, established Silicon Valley companies and well-financed startups are feverishly working on robot cars, which experts predict will be commercially available by 2020 or 2021, most likely as taxi fleets.
Russell and co-founder Jason Eichenholz, 45, Luminar’s chief technology officer, say their product offers 50 times greater resolution and 10 times more range than rivals. Most critically, it can see dark objects — black cars, pedestrians in dark clothing, debris on the road — at a distance of more than 650 feet.
“Sure, some (other lidar sensors) can see a bike reflector or a white car” at that range, Eichenholz said. “But we can see an object that is only 10 percent reflective.”
Indeed, the demo included a dark gray billboard, situated 656 feet away from Luminar’s sensor — and visible on its screen rendering.
If you can only see dark objects when they are 115 feet ahead, Russell said, “that’s a 1- or 1.5-second reaction time at freeway speed,” Russell said. “We provide 7 seconds reaction time.”
Eichenholz, an entrepreneur with a doctorate in laser physics, met Russell through his parents a few years ago and describes his cofounder as a brilliant physicist and inventor.
Russell spent a few months as a Stanford undergrad studying applied physics, then was recruited for the Thiel Fellowship, which gives $100,000 to young entrepreneurs to skip or pause college. The fellowship’s sponsor, billionaire investor Peter Thiel, persuaded Russell to devote himself to Luminar full time.
Rather than the spinning rooftop bucket familiar from early selfdriving cars, Luminar’s small lidar box can be discreetly mounted. It offers a 120-degree view; most cars would need four (because of overlap) to monitor the whole environment around them.
Even though current lidar sensors are pricey — sometimes even more than the cost of a car — like other electronics technologies, they will drop in cost, especially with volume demand, said Brad Templeton, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and inventor who was an early strategy and engineering consultant on Google’s selfdriving project.
“Most people think every self-driving car will come with a couple or more lidar” sensors, which are “the gold standard,” he said.
“It would be foolish not to give your system the super-human 3-D vision that lidar has.” Still, some companies are eschewing lidar in favor of using artificial intelligence to interpret camera images.
Alphabet’s Waymo, after initially using $70,000 lidar sensors from Velodyne Lidar Inc., developed its own for lower cost and better reliability.
Now it’s in a nasty legal battle with Uber, which Waymo accused of copying its lidar. (Uber denies this.)Morgan Hill’s Velodyne, which has major financial backing from Ford Motor Co. and China’s Baidu, is now prepping a San Jose factory to churn out a million lidar sensors a year in 2018. Quanergy of Sunnyvale says its solid-state lidar sensors eventually will sell for $250 each while offering competitive performance.
Russell is coy about Luminar’s pricing, saying only that it will be considerably less than Velodyne’s high-end $70,000 lidar, and “longterm, far below” Velodyne’s more-recent $8,000 system.
Luminar now has about 100 hand-assembled lidar sensors being tested by four major car companies, which it would not name. By year’s end, its 50,000square-foot factory in Orlando will have cranked out an initial 10,000 units, it said.
The company has about 50 employees doing research and development in Portola Valley, where it occupies a sprawling compound once used for tank repair (Russell owns his own personnel carrier tank) and another 100 employees at its Florida factory and offices.
Luminar designed and built all its sensor components (laser, receiver, scanning mechanism, processing electronics) from scratch. Its lasers operate on a higher wavelength (1,550 nanometers) than most other systems (905 nanometers), which Russell said means they can send out more pulses of light for higher-definition sensing, but “won’t fry your eyes.” The military uses similar “eye-safe” lasers.
To help human operators “see” what the lidar sees, activity shows up on a big screen as a highly detailed “point cloud” in a rainbow of colors, with different colors for objects depending on how close or far they are, like a psychedelic Peter Max album cover.
During a test drive along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, Russell proudly pointed out how the system “sees people and vehicles at insane levels of resolution.” When a motorcycle cut off his Mercedes Metris, he exclaimed with glee about the screen view: “Look, you can even see it doing a wheelie!”