It is predicted that the global shipments of front-loading models equipped with lidar will be in the order of thousands in 2021, and there will be an exponential increase in 2022-2023 - reaching tens of thousands of units / year, and 2025 may be the next exponential jump - reaching hundreds of thousands of units / year. Lidar has become a must for China's new car-making forces to advance autonomous driving.
In 2021, more and more smart electric vehicle brands choose lidar solutions, from Weilai ET7, Xiaopeng P5 to WM M7, 2021 can be called the first year of lidar route mass production.
Lidar is a radar system that transmits a detection signal to the measured target, and then measures the arrival time, strength and other parameters of the reflected or scattered signal to determine the distance, orientation, motion state and surface optical characteristics of the target.
The advantages of lidar include:
1) Have extremely high distance resolution, angular resolution and speed resolution;
2) Strong anti-interference ability;
3) The amount of information obtained is rich, and the distance, angle, reflection intensity, speed and other information of the target can be directly obtained, and a multi-dimensional image of the target can be generated;
4) Can work all day. Compared with millimeter-wave radar, lidar can detect the human body, and compared with cameras, lidar can detect a longer distance.
In summary, a lidar consists of four major elements: the principle of ranging, the beam manipulation method, the light source, and the detector. On this basis, the different technical routes are a combination of the above related elements.
For unmanned systems above L4 level, lidar is considered one of the necessary sensors. At present, major autonomous driving companies have lidar as the focus of their sensor solutions, and at present, in the field of Robotaxi/Robotruck, the main application is the desporant-time lidar that can be scanned 360°, which is installed on top of the autonomous vehicle and has high technical barriers.
Gartner's 2019 automotive electronics technology maturity curve shows that the industrial chain gradually matures after the mems lidar as the representative of autonomous driving hardware after experiencing a trigger period and a desired expansion period.
Gartner predicts that from 2020 onwards, vehicles with L3 level autonomous driving hardware capabilities will be widely produced, and sensor technologies such as light detection and ranging (LiDAR) are mainly used to achieve automatic driving, which will be a popular component of the automotive industry in the next 5 years and help automatic driving mature. Since the beginning of this year, we have found that the lidar industry is undergoing positive changes, and the industry may usher in a period of accelerated development in 2021.
The LiDAR-equipped Audi A8 was equipped with Valeo's 4-line SCALA lidar in 2017 and claims to match L3-level assisted driving, which is the world's first pass-through lidar. However, as Audi's flagship model, not many Audi A8 users have really experienced the lidar, and at the same time, its opening functions are also very limited.
Its real role is to bring about the trend of lidar mass production pre-installation.
On the other hand, the cost of lidar is not unacceptable. Lidar has a Moore's Law similar to that of computer chips: every 18 months, the price of doubling the resolution of lidar sensors is halved. At least 5 years ago, lidar was considered expensive equipment.
Huawei's vehicle-grade medium- and long-range 96-line lidar product has reduced the cost of lidar to $200.
At the same time, with the gradual maturity of lidar MEMS technology, in the case of many mass production models of vehicle regulations, the cost of the front-loading fixed point is completely different from the previous blue roof cylindrical mechanical lidar. Some lidar suppliers revealed that the cost of solid-state lidar using MEMS technology can be reduced to less than $500.
The new generation of technology breakthroughs + large-scale mass production orders are the two major conditions for cost reduction. That is to say, with the increase in the number of lidar mass production front-loading models, it is also driving the cost of lidar down.
The use of lidar by the new forces of Chinese car manufacturing is their understanding of China's complex road conditions, including the difference in the cognition of the whole scene road conditions between China and the United States, which also leads to the new forces of Chinese car manufacturing and Tesla born in the United States to make different choices in the perception scheme.
Therefore, the new forces of Chinese car manufacturing generally choose the lidar scheme, which can be said to be a conservative choice, or it can be said that they are more willing to pay a certain cost to get safer results.
Part of the source of the graphic | Internet