Opsys Tech has created a Solid-State Scanning LiDAR. What is this and why is it a breakthrough? One of the keys to making LiDAR automotive grade is to improve reliability and lower production costs. That’s why Opsys has simplified the technology. You still get the three-dimensional functionality of LiDAR in the auto sensing suite, but you don’t have complex machinery that is far too expensive and balky for mass production.
Eitan Gertel, Chairman of the Board of Directors at Opsys and one the company’s co-founders, came to the automotive LiDAR problem from the optics industry. He brought a fresh, outsider’s perspective to laser-scanning technology. Eitan and the Opsys team figured out a way to combine best-in-class accuracy with the low-cost reliability automakers need.
“Any moving parts in the system will affect your reliability, it will make your production process extremely complex.” Eitan says. “It will actually limit your performance; how fast can you scan your field of view to achieve the specification required. You can achieve the basic functionality of a LiDAR with moving parts, but to get to the next level of maturity, we believe having no moving parts is how you can not only improve your performance, but bring different aspects which are very important for large scale production.”
“In addition, it’s very important to achieve this with a scanning LIDAR. You can have a solid-state LiDAR with a flash, but the flash LiDAR is not capable of achieving the performance that's required by the automotive systems and is not efficient in any way. So, the whole technology we have developed was based on how do you get to a scanning LiDAR to be able to scale the beam across the field of view, do it very fast and do this with no moving parts?”
So, the breakthrough is not the scanning itself, but how do you achieve the scanning with no moving parts, because scanning means you must take a beam that is generated by a light source and be able to scan it across your field of view. So, unless you have another way of achieving it, you must have some type of mechanism to steer your beam. We’ve managed to achieve this with absolutely no moving parts. The attributes a fast-scanning system will give you is everything from signal reliability to signal quality, plus the ease of manufacturing, because you don't have any moving parts. This allows for automated manufacturing, so you can scale your product to high quantities and deliver cost saving to your customers continuously.”
Opsys speaks to automakers and Tier-1 suppliers all the time about their unique solution. Such advanced conversations with industry leaders have convinced Opsys it is on the right track.
To listen to the interview click on the image above.