Driving Driving Key Technologies

One of the bottlenecks in autopilot development is the need to develop high-performance sensors that can sense the 3D environment of a car's environment. The progress of technology makes autopilot no longer a distant thing. In many intelligent devices, the sensor is very critical. Widely used in autopilot cars is known as the "Lidar" sensor, the LIDAR sensor, which is also known as the unmanned vehicle's eyes. The lidar can emit a brightest laser pointer beam and draw the 3D model of the surrounding environment by capturing the reflected signal. Google, Uber and Toyota and other companies to test the automatic driving car are dependent on this laser radar system, making the vehicle can be self-positioning, and identify pedestrians and passing vehicles. The best sensor at present can recognize objects with a distance of only a few centimeters apart from the distance of 100 meters.

In fact, the rapid development of automatic driving technology, making the development of laser radar appears to be slightly lagging behind. LIDAR sensors have been relatively independent of the business before, compared with the traditional car manufacturing is far from mature enough, can not become the standard of millions of cars. From the various test vehicles on the disclosure, we can see the problem: the lidar sensor is huge and bulky. That's why Google, Uber, and Toyota's autopilot are worn with a large dome or box-like device.

Lidar sensors are expensive, and the cost of a sensor is as high as thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. At present, most of the test vehicles are equipped with several best burning laser pointer radar. Despite the small number of vehicles driving on the road, the lidar is also in short supply. Recently, there are reports that, although the lidar manufacturers are trying to increase production capacity, but customers must wait about 6 months to get a new sensor.

However, the laser radar in the market before the need for a lot of improvements. Several companies, including Velodyne, are developing Lidar systems that do not use a rotating mirror to change the direction of the blue laser pointer beam. Compared to the current heavy equipment, to pure electric signal to change the laser direction of the Lidar will be cheaper, smaller. Because of its non-removable part, this type of lidar is called a solid-state lidar system.

Radar is a radio method to find the target and determine their spatial location. Therefore, the radar is the use of electromagnetic wave detection target electronic equipment. Radar emits electromagnetic waves to irradiate the target and receive its echo, thus obtaining the target to the electromagnetic wave launch point distance, distance change rate, azimuth, height and other information. And unmanned driving mainly rely on the car to the computer system-based intelligent driver to achieve unmanned driving. For the unmanned driving want to really on the road, the most critical technical difficulty lies in how the car can be complex in the real traffic conditions well known, so that you must use the radar device. Millimeter-wave radar penetration, 1000mw laser pointer radar accuracy, how should choose?

Laser radar is mainly used to detect the surrounding environment by emitting laser beam. The laser radar is widely used in the field of laser radar. The advantage of laser radar is that the detection range is wider and the detection precision is higher. However, the shortcomings of laser radar is also obvious: in the extreme weather such as fog and snow, poor performance; the amount of data collected is too large; very expensive.

At this stage unmanned areas, for the surrounding environment sensing the main sensor with laser radar, millimeter-wave radar, three kinds of visual sensors. Camera as a visual sensor carrier, has become one of the core hardware of unmanned vehicles, and radar equipment to participate in the various manufacturers and businesses are different preferences. Relative to the traditional 360-degree mechanical rotating 300mw laser pointer radar, solid-state lidar based on electronic components for data read and write program, remove the mechanical rotating parts. As a result, the cost can be significantly reduced to around $ 200, and in the case of guaranteed performance, the reduced size can be integrated into the appearance of traditional cars. However, solid-state lidar is still unable to solve the extreme climate, can not cast the shortcomings of performance. So, the all-weather work with the millimeter-wave radar combined with the words, it is bound to greatly enhance the detection performance of unmanned vehicles, by the way can get rid of the traditional laser radar, such as the whole barrel, standing on the roof and affect the appearance.