HN Gopher Feed (2017-10-09) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
GM to buy LIDAR sensor-tech firm Strobe
116 points by mudil
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-strobe-m-a-gm/gm-to-buy-senso...___________________________________________________________________
deepnotderp - 5 hours ago
Very interesting and possibly scary for LIDAR startups (e.g.
Luminar). If I'm not mistaken, the Strobe LIDAR is a flash LIDAR?
deepnotderp - 3 hours ago
Apparently it's actually frequency modulation
lidarhttps://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/sel...
jakarta - 6 hours ago
Kyle Vogt blog post on the deal: https://medium.com/kylevogt/how-
were-solving-the-lidar-probl...
Fricken - 6 hours ago
It's also worth reading Kyle's blog post from last week. Cruise
is doing some stuff that nobody else can do. Not even
Waymo:https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-
in...GM right now is the most vertically integrated of all the
companies making meaningful progress on Robotaxis. They have a
dedicated assembly line set up building off the Chevy Bolt
platform, and intend to have 'thousands' of them on the road
before the end of 2018. They're building their own ride hailing
app, called Cruise anywhere, currently only available to GM
employees. They've got On-star, which provides in-house expertise
with connected car and vehicle diagnostic services. GM's Maven
subsidiary offers car sharing services.But when Robotaxis really
proliferate fleet management infrastructure will be very
important. Apple and Waymo have made partnered with Hertz and
Avis respectively, but General Motors can utilize the real estate
and expertise of it's existing network of dealerships, which can
save them from a great deal of capital investment as Robotaxis
dissemintate.Before last December there wasn't a whole lot to be
known about Cruise's progress, but since then it's just been one
reason after another to be getting excited about what they're
doing.
RandallBrown - 5 hours ago
I never thought about car companies being able to use their
dealerships for their fleets. That will actually be a pretty
huge advantage in smaller towns where there won't be enough
business to have the cars driving continuously.
koiz - 5 hours ago
Aren't they still working out the actual software... To make
all of this work...hardware wise they are ahead but people
around here have been tooting the GM horn just because they can
produce cars.
saosebastiao - 6 hours ago
That article was interesting. I've been a truck driver, with
recurring jobs throughout San Francisco, and can attest to how
nerve-racking it can be. In order to drive trucks there
successfully, you have to know the roads really well, as your
GPS is often worthless (so many different rules, changing
conditions, unpredictable drivers/cyclists/pedestrians, as well
as truck-specific restrictions). From a pedestrian safety
perspective, I really appreciate that there are companies that
are prioritizing San Francisco as a testing ground.I still
think Seattle is more difficult to drive in. The streets are
narrower (most residential streets are two way, but only wide
enough for one car width, requiring drivers to negotiate with
other drivers on how to proceed). There are far more 3,5,6 and
even 7 way intersections[0]. Just as many hills as San
Francisco, but the several poorly-intersecting street grids
give the hills much worse visibility. And I'm willing to bet we
have way more construction than San Francisco.[0]
https://vimeo.com/124481186
dsfyu404ed - 4 hours ago
>I really appreciate that there are companies that are
prioritizing San Francisco as a testing ground.I think it has
more to do with them not having a snowball's chance in hell
in Boston, Rome or New Delhi (in increasing order of
difficulty).We haven't even seen a driver-less car floor it
on a green to make a left before the opposing traffic moves.
muraiki - 3 hours ago
In Pittsburgh this is known as the "Pittsburgh Left",
although there are various other cities and states that lay
claim to the name!
:)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left
astrange - 2 hours ago
SF has plenty of unprotected left turns against traffic.
I haven't seen a driverless car outside Mountain View,
but hopefully they actually make those turns and don't
just get stuck?That said I remember the occasional drive
straight down a cliff in Pittsburgh beating even the SF
hills.
ihoshjd - 33 minutes ago
Yeah, certainly one of the key ways pedestrians are killed,
entilted drivers who can't be bothered to wait.Unprotected
left turns are one of major ways pedestrians are murdered
by careless drivers.
zitterbewegung - 5 hours ago
They also have invested in Lyft for $500 Million USD. See
https://blog.lyft.com/posts/lyft-1billion-gm
Fricken - 4 hours ago
Vogt did an interview with Forbes earlier this summer, in
which he implied that the Lyft investment was done on the
initiative of some other arm of General Motors, and that
Cruise doesn't need no stinking rideshare partnership. I
guess we'll see how that plays
out.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beaaidqx4vA
zitterbewegung - 4 hours ago
Isn't it just a hedge if Cruise doesn't work out? Or GM for
that matter?
apohn - 5 hours ago
>...but General Motors can utilize the real estate and
expertise of it's existing network of dealerships, which can
save them from a great deal of capital investment as Robotaxis
dissemintate.I was involved in a project at a major US auto
maker where they wanted to utilize spare capacity at the
dealers on something similar to what you are discussing. In
this case, we would pay the dealers to utilize that capacity.In
some states, the dealer networks are large, politically very
influential, and are not inclined to allow anything that will
disrupt the status quo of selling and leasing cars. They
absolutely had their hands around the throat of the auto maker
and forced us to go another route just because they saw what we
were trying to do could possibly change their income flow in
some small way.In theory, GM has the infrastructure and is
making the right acquisitions. In practice the vast majority
of the company is entrenched in selling and leasing cars and
many people in the company don't have the imagination to see
the world differently. GM has a lot of internal and external
politics to overcome before they are successful with autonomous
cars and Robotaxis.
vvanders - 4 hours ago
Yeah, additionally dealerships are commonly multi-regional
run under different names so finding competition within a
brand can be difficult.Generally you tend to have to go
150-200mi to get to a different parent company.
vkuruthers - 3 hours ago
Anyone have any info on how the Strobe Lidar(s) compare to Velodyne
systems?
rikelmens - 1 hours ago
This guy seems to be the master mind behind GM's explosive growth
in this area: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ostojic/
Fricken - 19 minutes ago
Can I ask why you say that? Not that I disbelieve you, but there
isn't very much public information about Sasha Ostojic to go off.
mhb - 3 hours ago
In a document prepared for a Korean trade delegation to Silicon
Valley in May, and obtained by IEEE Spectrum, Strobe claimed that
its prototype lidar had a range of 300 meters, a processing time of
fewer than 45 milliseconds, and cost less than $100. It also noted
that its first product would be commercially available in the
spring of 2018.https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/sel...
joshvm - 55 minutes ago
Probably fabrication cost, given that it's a prototype. It's a
research project so their estimates are a bit pie in the sky
right now. Until it's mass produced it'll be expensive, but who
knows, maybe GM will pull it off.Notable that this is an FMCW
system. Very few commercial players use frequency modulation,
they all use either AM or pulsed lasers.Rep rate is not so good.
45 ms = 20Hz maximum. That's poor compared to Velodyne (15kHz or
so per transceiver) or surveying stations which can push 1MHz.
Even hobbyist systems like the Scanse manage 4kHz. I'd guess
that the problem is, in part, because you need to chirp for a
certain amount of time. Pulsed systems often use avalanche diodes
that trigger from relatively few photons.It's 1D, so you've still
got to scan it which is bad for robustness. I'm more excited for
solid state LIDAR that uses beam shaping (or however they're
doing it) to scan without moving parts.The range is good though,
FMCW is great for that (and the accuracy should be good too). The
main advantage of FMCW is that you can still get the high
accuracy of AMCW systems (i.e. at a lower bandwith than direct
time of flight), but you don't have the phase ambiguity problem
that AM does.
was_boring - 1 hours ago
Is this retail, wholesale or cost to make prices?As someone who
works on their own cars, electric and self-driving cars have me
scared that it will not be possible in the future.
Shivetya - 1 hours ago
I figure a great deal of this will be standardized with modules
you swap out like you do a water pump and sensors like light
assemblies. plus it is not like all these older cars are going
anywhere.people vastly over estimate how fast self driving cars
will arrive and just as much the electric only revolution
Animats - 4 hours ago
Strobe seems to be using some very advanced physics. Here's a paper
on quantum LIDAR.[1] The semiconductor technology is exotic.[2] The
detectors in the research papers require cooling to superconducting
temperatures, but apparently that can be overcome. It's amazing
this technology is making it to the automotive environment this
fast.[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.6627.pdf [2]
http://www.princetonlightwave.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01...
post_break - 4 hours ago
I can't wait until LIDAR stuff ends up in junk yards from totaled
cars in the future. I'm sure there will be a bunch of amazing uses
for it.
kileywm - 4 hours ago
If autonomous vehicles are a success, then there may be
surprisingly few totaled cars in the future, compared to what we
see today. I'm excited for that and agree with you that some
really cool stuff can come out of the salvage of the future.It's
interesting to think about the situations where even the most
sophisticated sensors and software may be unable prevent an
accident that can total the vehicle. Animal crossings,
catastrophic vehicle part failure, surprise road debris, etc...
bitL - 3 hours ago
You can already buy LiDAR for $250 and RGB-D cameras for even
less...
jamiequint - 4 hours ago
If autonomous vehicles become a success you'll just be able to
buy LIDARs for super cheap because the market for them will drive
prices down significantly.
freehunter - 3 hours ago
You'd think so, but there are a lot of things that have a big
commercial market but are basically non-existent in the
consumer space unless you're willing to rip them out of
commercial products. As just one example, you can buy one 7"
HDMI touchscreen (just the screen) for $100 shipped [1] or for
the same money you can buy two Amazon Fire tablets with the
same size screen but twice the resolution, plus it has a full
mobile SOC with a quad core processor and a camera and I mean
it's a full tablet. Not just the screen. And it's half the
price.Even if Amazon is losing money on each Fire sold, I can't
imagine they're losing that much. They're getting those screens
for a hell of a lot cheaper than I can, and better quality too.
I imagine LCD touchscreens have a far bigger consumer demand
than LIDAR sensors ever will, so the dream of cheap LIDAR
sensors from Sparkfun will forever remain a dream. Grabbing one
from a junk yard will be the better option.[1]
https://www.adafruit.com/product/2407[2] https://www.amazon.com
/All-New-Tablet-Alexa-Display-Black/dp...
icebraining - 2 hours ago
Adafruit is notoriously pricy. Here's one for $54 with free
shipping: http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-7-Capacitive-Touch-
Screen-LCD-Di...But those include a "beefy DVI/HDMI decoder",
which the tablet doesn't need, since it can dump the raw
image directly from the graphics chip. You can probably find
a cheaper version if you can do the same.EDIT: To corroborate
my last point, a replacement screen for a Nexus 7 is just $22
(free shipping), and includes digitizer.
freehunter - 7 minutes ago
Similarly, I'd imagine a LIDAR sensor built for a Cruise
car to be $30 wholesale, $40 if you buy the exact same
thing as an aftermarket replacement part, and $150 if you
buy a standalone LIDAR sensor with the parts you need to
actually use it.Because a replacement Nexus 7 screen isn't
going to natively interface with my Raspberry Pi, and
neither will a Cruise LIDAR sensor. A $30 part that needs a
$20 interface isn't any better than a $50 part that
includes the interface.
ksk - 3 hours ago
Well buying anything in bulk will still be cheaper !
cr0sh - 3 hours ago
If you want to play with this stuff today, comparatively simpler
2D scanning LIDAR can be found cheaply on Ebay.You can usually
find used SICK units there for well under $500.00 USD (I once
scored one unit for $250.00); even when they look in terrible
condition they usually function fine (they are designed for
industrial environments and usage). These old units have a
downside in that they use older serial comms (RS-232 and RS-422)
that can be tricky to get going; for one unit I had, I had to
send it back to SICK to get it reset to RS-232; it was originally
set to RS-422 (faster), but to go back to the slower standard
required a converter, which I didn't want to spend the money on
if the unit didn't work properly. Then - on top of all that - I
had to set up a Window NT 4.0 workstation to use the software.
Plus they require a 24 volt DC power supply (great for mobility
chair robots, though!). Once I got it running, though -
everything worked well.They are also large - as in coffee pot
sized (in fact, they are kinda "affectionately" termed this), and
made of aluminum casting and other metals that make them
relatively heavy. This also makes them very robust, and are
perfect for medium and larger-scale robots (no desktop rovers
here - these sensors work well on robots the size of 24 VDC
mobility chair bases and larger); for instance, if you look up
Stanley from the Darpa Grand Challenge 2005 competition, you'll
see five of the units facing forward on top of the vehicle. Each
scans a line out many meters in front of the sensor, with a
field-of-view (FOV) of about 180 degrees. It's like a radar
sweep. As the platform vehicle moves forward, if the sensor is
angled down, you can build up a height-map of the terrain in
front of the platform. It is also possible to mount the sensor on
a turntable to rotate it while it is oriented vertically, and
scan a 3D volume, though at a much slower rate.The other low-cost
possibility is to purchase a surplus Neato robot vacuum LIDAR
sensor. These units are also 2D, but use a parallax shift method
of determining distance, kinda like explained here:https://sites.
google.com/site/todddanko/home/webcam_laser_ra...Instead of a
webcam, a 2D line-element imager is used. The whole contraption
is then mounted on a turntable with a slip-ring system (for
signals/power) to scan a 360 degree view around the sensor - the
whitepaper behind the sensor can be
found:http://www.robotshop.com/media/files/PDF/revolds-
whitepaper....These sensors - as pulls or replacements - can be
found on Ebay for about $100.00 USD each, and are much smaller
(desktop rover sized), but have a limitation in that they don't
work well outdoors (sunlight swamps the sensor) - but given the
device they were meant to be used on, an indoor vacuum robot,
that wasn't a concern.Another option people have tried has been
to get a low-cost 4-6 conductor slip-ring off Ebay (cheap), then
build a similar motor-driven scanning system like the Neato lidar
uses. For the actual sensor, a "LIDAR-Lite" module is used, which
are relatively inexpensive (more than a Neato module, less than a
SICK). They also have a longer range, and work well outdoors in
sunlight. These have been mostly "homebrew" systems, so googling
for such projects will be the best way to find them, but I've
given enough info here that you probably won't need much hand-
holding to implement something similar.A recent off-the-shelf
option that has become available, and is still fairly low-cost,
is the Scanse Sweep:http://scanse.io/At a price of $350.00 USD,
it isn't as cheap as a Neato sensor, but it does work better than
that unit while still being small with longer distance
capability, and is much cheaper than a new SICK LIDAR
unit.Finally, a form of LIDAR that is somewhat like a combination
of computer vision coupled with lasers, this project has always
been of interest to
me:http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/200110/vision.htmIt is
similar to the old webcam LIDAR I pointed out earlier, but uses a
laser to create a line (cylindrical lens element), which by
displacement viewed in the camera, and some simple trig, can lead
to a form 2D and 3D scene reconstruction.The original unit
described used a standard NTSC camera and a basic detection
circuit, but today one could potentially use a high-resolution
web camera, and a laser pointer with a line diffraction grating,
plus OpenCV to do the detection work. It is similar in principle
to the simpler 3D turntable scanners out there used for 3D
printing and model capture, if you need another example.So - I
guess all I can say is that if you are interested in this stuff,
there are many ways to play with it today, without having to wait
for future junkyard finds. While I agree that such sensors will
be neat to play with, and will only come down further in price as
they become more ubiquitous for manufacturers, you don't have to
wait...
joshvm - 1 hours ago
Your last example is a standard laser triangulation rig.
They're extremely simple to build and give excellent accuracy.
Here's an example system I was involved with for cast steel:
https://doi.org/10.1109/CRV.2016.55The pedant in me wants to
point out that laser triangulation has nothing to do with
LIDAR, even though it's commonly lumped in. It's basically a
parallax measurement, whereas LIDAR refers explicitly to time
of flight (either direct or by proxy from phase/frequency
offset).Mostly they're used for profiling on conveyor-based
systems - anything where the target moves underneath the
stripe. The downside is usually a big trade off with accuracy
and depth of field; and usually their usable range is poor (>
5m and you're struggling and have eye safety problems). You can
buy nm-precision systems, but they only work within a range of
a few cm. Also the triangulation angle is important - the
further away you go, the wider your laser-camera baseline needs
to be to retain accuracy.
csours - 4 hours ago
If only iPhones used LIDAR...
balsam - 6 hours ago
I gather that cheap quantum LIDAR[1] is their edge. Anybody care to
provide more details ;)?[1]https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-quantum-
LiDAR
syntaxing - 4 hours ago
Anyone care to explain the technological situation of Cruise? I
feel like I read mix messages all the time about them. Some say
that Cruise is just putting up smoke and mirrors while others make
it seem like they're the closest thing to level 4/5 autonomy
compared to anyone else. I'm super curious where they actually
stand in terms of technology.
ChuckMcM - 2 hours ago
Heh, that would be inside information would it not? If nothing
else, the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit shows how hotly contested self
driving technology is, and LIDAR technology in particular.I've
built a number of mobile robots over the years, and watched many
others build them as well as part of a robotics club. One truism
is that most robotics problems are pretty easy given ideal
sensors and sensors for every variable :-). When I started
building robots I quickly understood that 'sensor fusion' is more
about trying to tease reality out of a very noisy cloud of data
than it is AI or fancy software. I spent a month trying to get a
robot to go precisely straight so that my dead reckoning
algorithm would work.
syntaxing - 49 minutes ago
True, it would be pretty awesome if Cruise had some of their
code open sourced to have a peek at their technology. I was
looking at Google's Cartographer and it's pretty neat to see
some of their SLAM work. It would be nice to see something
equivalent from Cruise that shows what they're capable of
without revealing all of their tricks.
ChuckMcM - 17 minutes ago
I don't disagree, but you did see where Levandowski got $120
MILLION DOLLAR BONUS from Google right? There are literally
billions of dollars of investment risk riding on the outcome
of self driving coding and so nobody in a 'company' context
would be likely to be motivated to share anything at all
about how they were going about it. It would be like asking
folks who wrote lottery software to open source their PRNG
implementation so that people could see how cool their
technology was :-). The brief upside of 'coolness' is
massively outweighed by the major downside of 'used this
against you and cost you millions.' right?
maxerickson - 4 hours ago
The problem is that outsiders aren't going to have a clear
picture of the actual state of each implementation.The blog post
linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15435063 sure
makes it sound like they are making serious progress on the hard
problems.
Animats - 2 hours ago
The problem is that outsiders aren't going to have a clear
picture of the actual state of each implementation.The CA DMV
autonomous vehicle reports of accidents and disconnects are the
closest thing available to objective data right now. Waymo is
way ahead on disconnects. Cruise is getting rear-ended a lot
lately. Google used to get that a lot, but they seem to have
gotten past that.(The main compatibility problem with
autonomous vehicles so far is being rear-ended. The typical
situation is that the autonomous vehicle advances into an
intersection, detects some good reason to stop like cross-
traffic previously occluded, stops, and gets rear-ended. The
accel/decel profile for entering occluded situations may have
to be made more compatible with human behavior to get the human
drivers behind to behave properly. This isn't a big problem;
damage in those collisions is very low.)