According to the prediction of the French market research organization, the global green laser pointer radar market will reach 6.3 billion US dollars by 2023, and the market size including ADAS and autonomous driving will reach 5.2 billion, becoming the core target market of laser radar. .
In the automatic driving scene, the laser radar provider is mainly for BMW, Daimler and other automakers, Delphi, mainland and other Tier-1, numerous autopilot companies, Baidu, JD, Uber and other Internet technology companies and other industries. The product demand of downstream manufacturers, and the common needs of these potential customers determine the five trends that the laser radar industry will present in the next few years:
At the end of 2017, PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted that by 2030, the number of unmanned vehicles above the L3 level would reach 80 million. Although the forecasts of the scales vary from analysis to analysis, the overall trend of the number of auto-driving cars growing several years-on-year is certain.
As the core sensor necessary for high-level driverless driving, laser radar adaptability will become the basic condition for laser radar to enter the automatic driving market. At present, some manufacturers at home and abroad have successively launched car-level laser radar products, including lbeo, Innoviz, and Sagitar. The car-level laser radar that will be launched this year will have Velodyne and Jiaguang Technology, and other laser radar manufacturers are also developing. Car gauge laser radar, by 2019, we will see more car-level green laser pointer radar appear on the market.
The inevitability of laser radar chip is mainly supported by two factors. First, the laser radar volume needs to be made smaller, then the integration of internal devices is the only way; second, the cost, chip-based radar due to integration Multiple devices enhance stability while significantly reducing overall cost.
At present, Lidar manufacturers have different definitions of Lidar chips, and the integration parts are not the same. However, chips with independent intellectual property rights will become one of the core competitiveness of laser radar manufacturers.
After several years of continuous exploration, the laser radar industry has formed a mainstream technical solution based on TOF ranging with machine scanning and MEMS micro-mirror scanning, but the exploration of higher performance and higher stability technical solutions will continue. For example, the maturity of the Flash solution, the exploration and application of technologies such as OPA and SPAD will further promote the performance of the laser radar.
Quanergy is the supporter of OPA. The solution is technically difficult and the productization process will require more verification. SPAD can make large arrays, which can help laser radar to obtain farther measurement range and more accurate ranging accuracy. There is a promising exploration direction. Among the known laser radar manufacturers, only Jiaguang Technology has technical reserves in this respect. It is expected that the ultra-long-range SPAD laser radar products will be launched in the future.
The domestic laser radar industry still has a certain gap in terms of standardization compared with Europe and the United States, and the global mainstream standards are mainly based on surveying and mapping remote sensing. The standard of laser radar suitable for autonomous driving scenes is still blank, such as the data collection range and points. Cloud format, storage, sharing and usage data, and more. The standardization of autonomous driving is also blank, and the description of the grading standards for autonomous driving is still relatively vague.
Industry standardization involves many links and requires sufficient practical support. Therefore, the standardization of the laser radar industry and the autonomous driving industry is expected to be synchronized.
Mass production will promote the decline in the price of the green laser pointer radar, which will lead to more orders, and the upstream manufacturers of the laser radar will also gain new development opportunities. For example, due to the application of MEMS in vehicle-grade laser radar, the overall scale of the MEMS industry will gain new growth points. It is expected that the MEMS market will reach 31 billion US dollars by 2023. And as laser radar and downstream manufacturers continue to propose new demands, upstream manufacturers will also introduce new ones.