Nowadays, Lidar products have become good products that "can speak and practice" on the road to pre-installation and mass production. Harness, distance measurement, field of view, resolution... Judging from various data indicators, lidar is quite "invincible".
But just as the so-called "good horse is on the lap", when an autonomous vehicle actually runs, it is the real "big test" for various sensors.
"Popular fried chicken" lidar, how does the road actually perform?
The key to high-level autonomous driving
Car navigation lidar finally ushered in the opportunity to make strides forward to large-scale commercial use this year.
Comprehensive technology giants such as Huawei and Amazon have increased their investment in LiDAR, and many domestic and foreign manufacturers have actively promoted the pre-installation and mass production projects of self-developed LiDAR products. The first L3 autonomous driving mass production model equipped with LiDAR was officially released... , The pre-installed mass production of lidar can be described as vigorous.
At the cost level, thanks to the increasing maturity of the industrial chain, as well as the dual promotion of demand growth and technological progress, the cost of lidar is no longer prohibitive. In the past, domestic and foreign manufacturers such as Valeo, Surestar, Ouster, etc. The quotations for large-volume orders for car-gauge lidars dropped again and again. Later, Huawei announced that it would be a "price butcher" to reduce the cost to 200 US dollars or even lower. Now, the mass production cost of automotive-grade lidar is no longer a problem.
While the cost has dropped again and again, technical indicators such as lidar harnesses have risen again. Taking the domestic market as an example, manufacturers such as Hesai, Jingchi, and Rui Chi Zhiguang have all released 128-line car-level products. In addition, as the earliest domestic company to set foot in the field of lidar, the C-Fans series of Surestar’s products are not only The first domestic front-mounted lidar to achieve a complete vehicle-specific design, and the newly released C-Fans-256 has appeared on the test roads of many intelligent driving companies.
Although lidar is not the "only" of autonomous driving, as far as the current technology and industry development status is concerned, if you want to bring high-level autonomous driving, and even unmanned driving in a full sense into reality, lidar, the "core sensor of autonomous driving perception system" generally recognized by the industry, must be indispensable.
"Mass production on the car", speak with facts
Whether it is from the perspective of perception principles, technical indicators, or compliance with vehicle regulations, lidar is already outstanding and excellent enough. However, even if the performance parameters on the theoretical level are nowhere to be seen, if the actual effect is not good after the road, the laser radar products are still far from being installed on a large-scale self-driving mass-produced car.
A few days ago, Surestar conducted a road test on the self-developed C-Fans-128 front-mounted solid-state lidar. The test vehicle equipped with C-Fans-128 showed it in various key scenarios in the real road environment. Outstanding qualities that a "core sensor of an autonomous driving perception system" should have. It is a strong proof that today's lidar products can already shoulder the important task of "mass production on the car".
C-Fans-128 has an omni-directional field of view and ultra-long distance measurement, as well as a distance measurement accuracy of 2cm, which enables it to accurately capture the position point information of vehicles and pedestrians at a distance of 200m, providing great coverage for autonomous vehicles Broad vision for most driving difficulties. C-Fans-128 can “knowledge” the surrounding environment and improve the safety of self-driving vehicles, whether in road environments such as intersections and roundabouts, or in specific scenarios such as multi-vehicle confluence and traffic jams.
The horizontal angular resolution of 0.15° and fine gray scale recognition give C-Fans-128 powerful obstacle detection, abnormal event perception and lane line recognition capabilities. On country roads with complex road conditions and surrounding environments, autonomous vehicles equipped with this lidar can accurately detect vehicles parked on the roadside, vehicles coming from behind, and pedestrians on the side.
C-Fans-128 also has a vertical field of view of ±15°. When driving on a slope, it can ensure the complete sensing range of the autonomous vehicle and give full play to its accuracy on obstacles, especially small and medium-sized objects in the blind area of the vehicle occupant’s vision. Perception ability, when encountering emergencies, lidar can accurately and quickly capture abnormal events before the driver or occupant responds, so that the automatic driving control system can respond in time and control the self-driving car to avoid risks.
The scene of high-speed entry and exit tunnels puts many tests on the perception system of autonomous vehicles. In the process of driving into the tunnel, the vehicle-mounted environmental sensor needs to realize effective and reliable inspection of the boundary of the tunnel entrance to ensure the safety of the vehicle. When driving in a tunnel, because the lighting conditions inside the tunnel present the characteristics of "weak overall and strong local", it brings a lot of test to the quality of real-time imaging of the vehicle perception system. When the car leaves the tunnel, the fast-changing lighting environment makes the stability and reliability of sensing data acquisition face the dual challenges of strong light and backlight.
As a front-mounted solid-state lidar, C-Fans-128 performs well in tunneling scenes: the core range of 200m and the omni-directional horizontal field of view allow it to broadly and comprehensively obtain a large area around the vehicle. The position point information is formed into a three-dimensional real-time point cloud, and the boundary check can be completed accurately and quickly.
In the face of abnormal lighting conditions inside the tunnel and rapid changes in the light conditions when driving out of the tunnel, C-Fans-128 can always maintain the quality of perception by virtue of its low sensitivity to environmental conditions of the detection medium high-frequency radar. At the same time, C-Fans-128 has an ultra-high frame rate of the sports camera level, which can effectively help the real-time imaging effect of the autonomous vehicle perception system to be stable and good.
The technical strength is solid, the product can be excellent
As one of the earliest companies involved in the research and development of lidar in China, the C-Fans series of front-mounted solid-state lidars created by Surestar, not only shows its outstanding perception ability as the “eye of autonomous driving” in terms of parameters and measured performance,Surestar also relies on rich industry experience and strong technical strength to start from the aspects of vehicle regulation compliance, environmental adaptation, and price, makes this domestic first front-mounted lidar with a complete car gauge design "multi-talented".
On the core components of lidar such as semiconductor lasers, photoelectric sensors, and signal processing chips, Surestar has achieved a high degree of compliance with vehicle regulations. Among the C-Fans series products, C-Fans-32 is currently the only lidar product that has passed “Intrinsically Safe” certification; C-Fans-256 achieves a low power consumption of less than 16W and has passed ISO16750 for a total of 9 categories totaling 31 Compliance with high car regulations for the first test. In addition, all C-Fans products have passed 16949 (Quality Management Certification System for the Automobile Industry), and completed a series of car gauge reliability tests under the "ISO 16750" standard.
The C-Fans series lidar has an industrial protection level of IP67/IP69K. It has undergone reliability tests such as vibration, fatigue, high and low temperature, water release, electromagnetic compatibility, etc. It also meets the Class1 human eye safety standard and has successfully obtained the radiation safety certificate issued by the US FDA.
In addition, the all-solid-state laser transceiver array used in the C-fans series products further improves the detection reliability of the product in special/extreme environments. In terms of environmental adaptability performance, whether it is the severe cold environment of the snowfields in the northeast, the hot environment where the car body is exposed to more than 70°C in summer in the western Gobi, or the unstructured road under the salt fog and humid environment... In the severe test, C-Fans-256 all handed in the answer sheet with 0 breakdown.
Surestar has repeatedly overcome difficult problems in optomechanical structure, laser transceiver, signal processing, manufacturing process, chipization, light and miniaturization, etc., and is the first to miniaturize and solidify the laser transmitting and receiving module and signal processing module of the lidar. Micro-motor driven polygon mirror scanning. At the same time, based on the advantages of Surestar's independent intellectual property rights in chip and semiconductor technology, C-Fans series lidars achieve low cost in addition to high performance and high reliability, and are more suitable for large-scale The need for commercial applications has made a large field of view, long measuring range, high resolution, and low-cost vehicle-gauge lidar a reality.
The automotive lidar market has begun to explode in an all-round way. For any manufacturer, if you want to send your LiDAR products to the official production line of a vehicle manufacturer, you need to go all out to polish the products from all dimensions, no matter it is Perceived performance technical parameters are still measured on real roads.
Nowadays, China has become the world's largest passenger car market. The competition intensity of the domestic Lidar track will be almost as great as the market space in the future. Many large-scale companies have gained a firm foothold on the track and have grown stronger, but there will also be batches of teams and products being eliminated. Only lidar manufacturers with solid technical strength and excellent product performance can avoid dying "tomorrow night" and steadily eat the most delicious cake in the large-scale mass-produced lidar circuit.（www.isurestar.net）