The tech industry has spent the last decade asking whether self-driving cars need lidar sensors, cameras, or all of the above. Lidar company Ouster says it has a new answer: put them both in the same sensor.
On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced a new line of lidar sensors it calls “Rev8,” all of which offer so-called “native color lidar.” Capable of capturing color images and three-dimensional depth information at the same time, these sensors perform the work of two sensors in one.
Ouster CEO Angus Pacala said the development has been a decade in the making at his company, and he wasn’t shy about his ambitions for the new product range in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, calling it “the holy grail of what a roboticist has always wanted.”
“Throughout human history, it’s been: you buy a lidar sensor, you buy a camera, and you try to make sense of the combination with some higher-level reasoning and waste an enormous amount of time doing this,” he told TechCrunch. “And companies are only really halfway to calibrating and merging the data streams.”
Ouster’s new sensors, he said, change that equation.
“The goal is to avoid cameras. There’s no reason a sensor can’t do both,” he said.
The Rev8 series arrives at a dynamic moment for lidar companies. There has been a years-long wave of consolidation, with Ouster buying Velodyne and Luminar’s assets recently being acquired out of bankruptcy.
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At the same time, the market for sensors is exploding. Waymo and others have finally deployed working robot axes and are scaling quickly. Robot companies – humanoid and industrial – raise investment dollars and need sensors to perceive the world. There is so much interest in the space that new companies like Boston-based Teradar are emerging and testing the waters with entirely new modalities. (In Teradar’s case, it uses terahertz imaging.)
A color lidar that combines precise depth information with camera-quality image data could be especially valuable to the robot players, Pacala said. And he said Ouster worked with Fujifilm and image science company DXOMARK to understand “what it means to build a great camera.”
In fact, Pacala claims that Ouster’s color lidar “improves in many ways on a modern camera” thanks to the way the company already designs and builds its sensors.
Ouster uses so-called “digital lidar” architecture. Instead of the analog approach, which involves many moving parts, Ouster captures the lidar information directly on its custom chip using what are known as single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors.
The company uses the same SPAD technology to capture the color image data in the Rev8 sensors. Pacala said this new technique allows its image capture to be more sensitive than a normal camera.
“It’s 48-bit color, 116 dB dynamic range, like mega pixel resolution. These are top-line numbers that make it a pound-for-pound good camera. But it just comes as a pre-merged data stream like a 3D colored point cloud,” he said. “You can actually also use the data as a camera stream, but that’s what’s one of the strengths of this system is that you can use just the lidar data stream, you can use just the camera data stream, or you can use the pre-fused data stream, depending on how forward-thinking your perception team is.”
Pacala said his company has already sent samples to existing customers and is now accepting orders. He said he is particularly proud of the OS1 Max sensor, which he said he considers to be “the best long-range lidar in the industry.” It can see 500 meters in all directions and is smaller than other long-range lidars “by a large margin.”
“We’ve had a lot of LiDAR, but it hasn’t been as clear a cut across everything else,” he said. “It’s a big leap for Ouster. I think it means we’re going to start seeing it a lot more on high-speed robo-trucking, robotaxi applications, I think a lot of drone stuff is going to transition to OS1 Max.”
Other new lidars built on the Rev8 platform will include the OS0, OS1 and OSDome, according to a press release.
Ouster is not the only company that has started talking about color lidar. Last month, Chinese company Hesai announced its own color lidar platform, which it says will enter mass production by the end of this year. Other companies, such as Innoviz, have previously given their own take on “color lidar.”
Pacala says that most other players who try to “merge” cameras and lidar sensors basically package them together in a box. The approach Ouster (and, to be fair, Hesai) is taking is to put lidar and imaging technology on the same chip.
This dramatically cuts the amount of work Ouster’s customers have to do to understand the competing sensor streams, Pacala said, and it also sets up those customers to eventually avoid cameras — all while being cheaper and smaller than Ouster’s previous technology.
“This kind of fundamentally changes the value of what we sell to a customer from this stage forward,” he told TechCrunch.
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