The unmanned driving perception system led by 3D lidar is the mainstream laser pointer technology route adopted in the field of unmanned driving today. But the cost of 3D lidar has always been the pain point of this technical route. Take the product of Velodyne, the most well-known company for producing 3D lidar, as an example. The prices of the three products are 80,000 U.S. dollars, 20,000 U.S. dollars, and 8,000 U.S. dollars according to the highest performance. In the R&D and testing phase of driverless cars, scientific research institutions including Google and Baidu have been using the $80,000 version for testing. The total cost of Google's driverless cars is approximately more than $300,000. The 64-line 3D lidar HDL-64 accounts for 25% of the vehicle cost.
R&D trend 2: Cost reduction with application After the first stage of R&D technological innovation. Excessive cost is the main problem of unmanned driving perception systems based on 3D lidar. The focus of sensor production companies for lidar R&D has changed from functional enhancement to cost control. This entered the second phase of research and development. Reduce costs to achieve industrial applications. At the conference known as the "technical vane in the consumer electronics field".
In 2020, the scale of laser pointers in the lidar market is expected to exceed 10 billion. It is expected that lidar will benefit from technological improvements and increased productivity. It is estimated that the cost of a lidar will reach 400 yuan in 2020. If 2-4 LIDAR (front and rear detection distances) are installed on the vehicle, the corresponding cost is 800-1600 yuan. According to the market penetration rate of 25% before and after 2020 and the penetration rate of 5% in the aftermarket, the Chinese market is expected to be close to 20 billion. The laser beam can travel long distances without climbing high-voltage towers. With the help of the "laser cannon" in front of you, you can get rid of the foreign objects hanging on the wires under the high-voltage tower. According to the staff, this "laser cannon" is actually a "grid debris remover", a set of remote grid debris removal system based on directional emission energy from the ground. It is mainly composed of laser generator, aiming device, handheld controller and electric tripod.