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Pioneer Looks To Laserdisc Tech For Low-Cost LIDAR
itwbennett writes: Pioneer is developing a 3D LIDAR (light detection and ranging) sensor for use in autonomous vehicles that could be a fraction of the cost of current systems (the company envisions a price point under $83). Key to this is technology related to optical pickups once used in laserdisc players, which Pioneer made for 30 years. From the ITWorld story: "The system would detect objects dozens of meters ahead, measure their distance and width and identify them based on their shape. Pioneer, which makes GPS navigation systems, is working on getting the LIDAR to automatically produce high-precision digital maps while using a minimum of data compared to the amount used for standard maps for car navigation."
GPS location information has revolutionized mapping. Google and Apple get high quality position data for cars traveling. Any non-mobile platform system have many barriers to entry (cars traveling around taking photos), verifying road information. Google gets to validate incredibly accurate maps under the guise of providing traffic, location services and so on the the mobile phone users.
LIDAR, particularly those paired with accurate color mapping information for those point clouds are going to be creating high accuracy, full color 3d meshes of the pretty much anywhere that cars go near. The small snippet of video just after https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (from the previous slashdot article about autonomous golf carts) shows some of the power of LIDAR. Just after the car flyby it shows the point map being updated by every pass through an area. Incrementally correcting the 3D view of the area. The example is just a few passes by the same car.
Imagine 1000s or 100,000s of automonous vehicles with LIDAR pushing data to a vendor for "navigation experience", but still building a 100% model of everything line of site to the LIDAR. And then imagine 100s of drones flying overhead, doing virtually the same thing.
Throw in some AR like Magic Leap being able to deal with that 3d Mesh. Pretty amazing things that our kids will grow up, pretty scary for everyone else..
I've collected Laserdiscs and players for several years, though haven't really been into it much lately. I have more than 500 movies and at least four working players...
I can now build an autonomous vehicle!
WOOHOO!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Sure, if you assume no processing time is required to characterize what the sensor sees, and want to slam on the brakes at a minimum of 0.66g's of deceleration the moment anything enters the edge of your perception. That doesn't seem like a viable human-carrying vehicle to me.
Most accidents occur at less than 40 mph; if "dozens of meters" equates to about 100 ft, that represents about 1.7 seconds at 40 mph. Assuming a coefficient of friction of 0.8, it is theoretically possible for a car traveling at 40 mph to stop in 67 ft; call it roughly 70 ft. If the system can apply the brakes within 500 ms, that's enough to be useful, although clearly it can't stop you from plowing into a car stopped in the fast lane of the highway.
Speaking of highways, the only reason people can manage to drive on highways is that the things you're most likely to hit are traveling in the same direction; if they were slaloming between stationary obstacles at 60 mph most drivers would be dead, fast. What makes highway driving safe is that the closing speed between vehicles is usually modest; usually on less than ten fifteen miles per hour. So actually the system might have more effect on the highway so long as speed discrepancies are in the normal range.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
really? that is what they are famous for?
I have to google it...ah for cars:
http://www.pioneerelectronics....
4wdloop
Oh god, please don't let this happen. My police laser detector will be completely worthless.
If you can't afford a new V1 every few years, you can't afford to speed. At least, not as a lifestyle.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
fuck it, it won't do as much work at a relative speed of 140 mph, lets all go home.
who's idea was it to develop this piece of shit?
have him taken out back and shot.
> Sure, if you assume no processing time is required
Let's give the system time to do a million processing operations. The GPU and CPU should be running at 1 Ghz or better, so we need 0.001 seconds to run a million operations.
70 MPH is 103 feet per second, or 1236 inches per second. So in the .0001 seconds required to do a million processor ops the car will travel 1.2 inches. You figure it could do more extensive processing, 10 million operations? Okay, that's 1 foot of travel.
Computer processors are really, really fast. Hard disks not so fast, but this system isn't reading the data from a hard drive.
> slam on the brakes ... the moment anything enters the edge of your perception.
?!?!? I'm not sure how that comment has anything at all to do with what is being discussed. The ONLY time "slam on the brakes" would ever make sense would be if there was a large stationary object directly ahead. Most cases requiring action are for moving objects on a collision course, such as someone on a cross street who is on course to T-bone you at the upcoming intersection. Since the other car is moving, you can either tap the brakes and let them pass in front, or speed up a little and go through first. Or turn. Only a light tap on the brakes is needed from 100 feet away in order to give the other car the extra 1 second they need to pass in front of you rather than hit you.
The way it works, for humans or computers, is that you measure the distance to the object and it's vector - direction and speed. The hardware does this measurement rather faster human wetware does - it's a time differential thing, so it can be done directly in silicon, no code required if you want it very fast. Figure about 1,000 microseconds, or 1 ms. This measurement is passed to the processor, which does a bit of math to determine if the object is on a collision course with the car. Remember CPUs are really fast at math. That's the 1ms we discussed above.
So we have about 1 ms to detect vector, and 1 ms to determine whether or not it's a collision course. The car has traveled 2.4 inches during this time. Assuming it is a collision course, we continue. We already have these two pieces of information:
1. some is coming from the left
2. it is scheduled to collide with the left side of the vehicle, 120 feet from now
Given those two inputs, the car now needs to decide between three options:
Slow a bit, allowing the other car to pass in front
Speed up a bit, getting through the intersection before the other car
Turn*
A million operations, or 1ms, is plenty to choose between the three.
* "Turn" is mainly useful if you assume the other car is TRYING to hit you, so rather than continuing to go straight they'll turn and you don't know where they'll end up. The one thing you DO know about where a speeding car will be three seconds from now is that it won't be in the same place it is now. So steer toward where it IS and you can be pretty sure it won't be THERE any more.