Today, WEIO ET7 officially opened delivery, officially ushering in the 2022 lidar mass production trend. And as the perception expert behind it, Tutton is also worthy of a spotlight.
Wen 丨 wisdom driving network Huang Huadan
Today, NIO ET7 officially opened delivery.
On January 9, 2021, the promise made by Li Bin at the 2020 NIO Day was finally fulfilled.
It was truly the first production car to be equipped with lidar as standard.
After a year of dormancy, NIO will finally have a new model to join the increasingly fierce competition for electric vehicles, which will alleviate the decline in NIO's sales ranking on the one hand, and put NIO in the spotlight again.
This model, which focuses on the use of many of the latest technologies in the name of autonomous driving, is the most noteworthy in our opinion is its hybrid solid-state battery and the second is lidar.
Smart Driver Jun recently walked into Tutton Intelligence, the supplier of NIO's lidar, and walked into its Suzhou company to experience this lidar that will be installed in the body of NIO ET7 and ET5.
Tutton is a lidar company invested by NIO Capital, and Li Bin said after Nio Day about the companies invested by NIO Capital that more than 20 companies have been laid out in the upstream and downstream of the intelligent car industry chain.
In 2021, a number of models announced that they will be equipped with lidar on the car, Weilai ET7 let Tudtong stand in front of the public for the first time, how such a start-up company can achieve the mass production of lidar on the car, what its technical advantages are, and how to reduce costs are all topics of concern in the industry.
——01——
Who is Tutton?
Founded in November 2016, Innovusion was founded by Rev. Bao, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
▲ Tudtong founder Bao Junwei
As early as 1998, Bao Rewell and two partners founded a company specializing in semiconductor optical measurement technology, and was later acquired by the world's third largest semiconductor equipment manufacturer, Japan Tomco Electronics, in 2014 Bao Junwei joined Baidu's U.S. R&D center, and was responsible for the on-board computing system and sensor team after Baidu established the autonomous driving division, determining the technical development route of LiDAR and a variety of sensors, during which time contributed to the deep partnership between Baidu and Velodyne.
Two years later, Bao Junwei left Baidu to create Tudtong, which focused on lidar.
In 2018, Tutuitum officially released the Innovusion Cheetah Lidar, the world's first long-range detection lidar that combines image-level resolution with a high signal-to-noise ratio. After mass production, it is mainly for the development and testing of L3+ level autonomous vehicles.
Tutton's ultimate goal is the market for autonomous driving after large-scale commercialization.
Since then, Tutuitous has released two new lidars in 2019 and 2020, namely Jaguar Elite LiDAR and Falcon.
▲ Tudtong LiDAR Jaguar Elite Edition
Also in October 2018, Tutton's Series A funding round received $30 million from China's NIO Capital, Eight Rods Ventures and F-Prime in the United States.
In May and August 2021, the US$64 million Series B round and the US$66 million Series B+ round were completed, and new investors appeared Temasek, BAI Capital and Joy Capital, Guotai Junan International Private Equity Fund and Shunwei Capital. Among them, the old shareholder Weilai Capital has continued to invest.
However, if it is only because NIO Capital invested in Tutton, so in the end, NIO ET7 adopted Tutton's Falcon lidar, which is not entirely appropriate.
Conversely, it was precisely because Tuduitton first launched cheetah lidar that it attracted NIO capital and eventually succeeded in getting falcons to board ET7.
▲ Tudtong lidar mounted on the NIO ET7
The most prominent feature of This lidar is that of image-level, ultra-long-range lidar.
Of course, because it will be installed on the mass production car, the most successful falcon lidar is to achieve two major breakthroughs, namely low cost and vehicle specification level inspection.
——02——
Why Hybrid Solid-State LiDAR?
The types of lidar mainly include mechanical rotary lidar, hybrid solid-state radar and solid-state lidar. Among them, hybrid solid-state radar is considered to be the best choice for current mass production vehicles.
Tutton's lidar is a hybrid solid-state radar.
Pure solid-state lidar is the goal of industrial development, and its advantages include compact size, reliable performance, easy integration, low cost, etc., but the biggest crux is that the technology is immature and cannot meet the high reliability requirements of L3+ autonomous vehicles for lidar.
The advantages of hybrid solid-state lidar can be summarized as: fixed laser transmitting and receiving devices, low cost, mature industrial chain, can build high-performance, vehicle-compliant mass production products. At this stage, it can be smaller and cheaper than mechanical rotary lidar, and at the same time, it is relatively easy to achieve without the high difficulty and uncertainty of pure solid-state lidar in terms of core devices.
Bao Rewei said: "Hybrid solid-state lidar is actually a transitional stage between mechanical rotary lidar and pure solid-state lidar. In the long era of autonomous driving in the future, there will be several generations of product mass production space, and the time is about 10-20 years. This is a necessary step for the industry, and we are convinced that hybrid solid-state lidar is a first-generation mass-produced lidar product that meets the safety needs of high-level autonomous vehicles. ”
——03——
Safe autonomous driving requires reliable perception
Tutton's Falcon uses a laser beam with a wavelength of 1550 nm. Compared with traditional 905nm lasers, 1550nm lidar has the following advantages:
First, it is easy to meet the requirements of human eye safety,
Second, the anti-interference ability is strong,
Third, beam collimation is better,
Fourth, the brightness of the light source is higher.
In the application process, it is possible to achieve a longer detection distance and more detailed object obstacle recognition, thereby creating more reaction time for people and vehicles, and improving the safety and comfort of automatic driving.
▲ Its dots can recognize fonts and colors
According to Bao, at present, only Tutton and Luminar in the world are vigorously cooperating to make vehicle-grade 1550nm lidar.
In addition, the Falcon can achieve a detection distance of 250 meters at 10% reflectivity in the detection distance, with a resolution of 0.06° * 0.06 °.
▲ Tutton LiDAR Falcon
Self-driving cars need to avoid all kinds of obstacles on the road, but only brake and detour when the obstacles are judged very accurately, and we judge that obstacles with a height of more than 20cm need to be detoured.
When the size of the obstacle is reduced from a car to 20cm high or black tires (reflective about 3%), it can only be detected by lidar at a distance of 100 meters to 150 meters if the detection distance meets 250 meters (10% reflectivity). This distance is the safe distance for reliable perception when the self-driving car is driving at a high speed of 120 km/h.
It is worth mentioning that TDT LiDAR also has an original "fixed gaze" function, which can generate a high-density point cloud in the field of view to obtain more accurate three-dimensional information, so as to better track vehicles and pedestrians or adjust according to the slope of the road surface, improving the reliability and safety of autonomous driving.
Although, for the development route of automatic driving, Tesla high-profile choice of pure vision, because Musk believes that automatic driving can take biomimicry, since humans can only use the eyes, the vehicle should naturally be able to achieve perception with a pure visual scheme.
But to this day, Tesla's FSD (fully autonomous driving) function is still in the L2 stage, which can only be regarded as an advanced driver assistance function. More critically, most car companies cannot obtain a huge driving data like Tesla to train their visual systems.
The vast majority of players in the market today, whether traditional OEMs or high-level autonomous driving companies, agree with the use of a variety of sensor fusion solutions, especially lidar + camera + millimeter wave radar.
The Aquila supersensitive system equipped with the NIO ET7 includes:
1 ultra-long-range high-precision lidar (Tutton Falcon)
11 x 8MP HD cameras
5 millimeter wave radar
12 ultrasonic sensors
Lidar works with other sensors to meet the safety and reliability of autonomous driving.
Bao Junwei believes: "The pure visual solution is not useless at all, but there are some scenes that definitely cannot solve the problem, and the driving life is at stake, and all the problems must be solved." ”
In the process of driving, in the face of road emergencies, we need to collect information, perceive prediction, and make decisions in a very short period of time. However, in the case of traffic congestion, road complexity, environmental interference, fatigue driving, etc., it is difficult for drivers to make accurate judgments in time. The role of lidar is to help us make decisions in advance and to brake the vehicle safely.
At the same time, in the large light ratio, dark light, stationary object recognition, lidar has an advantage that the camera cannot match.
"Lidar is an important development direction in the future. According to authoritative research data, China's lidar market is expected to reach $4.31 billion in 2025; 3 out of every 100 private cars in China will be equipped with lidar. ”
——04——
Why did NIO ET7 choose Tudtong LiDAR?
Lidar needs to meet three necessary conditions for getting on the car, namely: to meet the safety requirements of automatic driving, to meet the requirements of vehicle regulations, and to meet the controllable mass production costs.
In addition to safety and reliability, cost is obviously another important consideration for OEMs when choosing suppliers. The technical route chosen by Tutton is based on a relatively mature industrial chain, which can significantly reduce costs with the increase of production.
The current industrial chain of hybrid solid-state lidar is relatively mature, and mass production is not difficult. The scanning mirror method used by Tutton is the motor, mirror, and the controller of various motors, which has been very mature in the industry after years of development, and also provides a guarantee for the mass production of Tudtong lidar.
When asked about the cost estimate of its lidar products, Bao Rewei said: "We think that front-looking lidar, clear enough at a distance, costs three or four hundred dollars and four hundred dollars. "As for close-range lidar, such as delivery vehicles, robots, and sweeping robots, they are much cheaper, and may be able to come down for a few hundred yuan."
With the development of the industry, it will inevitably lead to technological progress and cost reduction. So, when the price of lidar reaches a certain critical point of mass production, continue to develop, is it necessary to pursue performance improvement or cost reduction?
Bao Rewei believes that the current Tutton LiDAR is the best in the world in terms of performance, but for the realization of reliable L3 or higher level of automatic driving, this performance can still only be considered qualified. If, on the basis of the existing one, the same performance can be achieved after five years, the price will be halved, or the same price, but the performance will be doubled, and Tutton's choice will be the latter.
——05——
Applications in other scenarios
In addition to getting on the bus, the extended application of Tutton lidar also includes smart transportation, smart high-speed, rail transit, unmanned mining card and other scenarios.
In the field of intelligent transportation, Tutton's image-level long-distance lidar Jaguar Elite Edition can detect 200 meters away, the maximum detection distance is 400 meters, and the detection of small obstacles reaches 100 meters away under the condition of 10% reflectivity. At the same time, it has the ability to integrate with the camera at the pixel level, which can provide reliable perception for intelligent transportation and ensure the safe and efficient operation of the elements involved in intelligent transportation.
Install multiple lidar at important intersections for point cloud fusion, and carry out 360° holographic coverage detection and perception of intersections, which can solve the blind spot of the car end from the roadside and provide safety redundancy for intelligent networked vehicles.
The Tutton lidar is used in highway scenes, and its ultra-high resolution and ultra-long detection distance can realize holographic fusion perception of all road sections.
At present, Baidu Apollo Intelligent Transportation City project has used Tuttosha's image-level long-distance lidar.
Not long ago, Tutton's Jaguar series of lidar completed the deployment of the high-level autonomous driving demonstration area in Yizhuang, Beijing.
With its wide field of view and high resolution, the Jaguar Series lidar can more accurately monitor and classify pedestrians and objects on the road.
To achieve L3+ automatic driving and meet the safety perception needs of urban low-speed and high-speed scenes, it is required that the vertical angle resolution of lidar is less than 0.1°, and the detection distance reaches more than 250 meters (10% reflectivity).
As a safety redundancy system for autonomous vehicles, roadside perception lidar also needs to achieve the same level of performance.
2021 is the first year of LiDAR, and many car companies have announced that their new models will be equipped with LiDAR. Many models equipped with lidar will be delivered this year.
With the official opening of the delivery of THE NIO ET7, the market will usher in the mass production of lidar in 2022.
As the perception expert behind Li Bin, Tutton is also worth a spotlight.
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