Tech companies agree that there is a piece of technology crucial in designing the first safe autonomous cars on the road. That piece of technology is the lidar, short for light detection and ranging.

This object that would be placed onto a car would use near-infrared light to detect the shape of objects around it. This is the same technology is used in airplanes and by cops to detect speeding violations. Although an autonomous car would also need other components to deem it safe such as an ultrasonic sensor, radar, and video cameras, the lidar is perhaps the most important of all. The lidar uses three dimensional images and works well in many different environments with many different lighting conditions, unlike cameras that are responsive to shadows or do not work in bright conditions.

The biggest problem companies have had in utilizing lidars is their expensive price tag. Google was the first to start experimenting with the lidar eight years ago when the price of a sensor was $75,000. Another inefficiency is that different lidars produced work in different ways and so different lidars cannot be exchanged between one car company and another. Although industry leader Velodyne Lidar would not put a price tag on what a sensor would cost nowadays, the company’s chief executive, John Krafcik, said that the cost has been reduced by 90 percent. Even with such a large reduction in price, car companies are not satisfied. According to Omer Keilaf, chief executive of Innoviz Technologies, a lidar developer in Israel, “ car companies want it to cost $100 and perform 10 times better, be smaller – and very reliable.”

Companies are working to meet those exact demands by shrinking the size of sensors by eliminating moving parts and making lidars easier to mass manufacturer, therefore also bringing down costs. However, these smaller sized sensors reduce the field of view from 360 degrees to about 120 degrees and so several would be needed on a car to give a full range of view. Hyundai has been testing its own autonomous cars and making sensors less noticeable by placing them in the bumpers and roof pillars of cars. Other companies, such as Luminar Technologies, is focusing on improving the performance of the lidars. As of now, a top performing lidar has a range of 120 meters, but Luminar Technologies want to push that range past 200 meters by using a more sensitive receiver and a more powerful light output.

Velodyne is currently the only third party supplier for autonomous vehicles and has plans to expand with work on mass production. There are many startup companies on the rise trying to get their own lidars into the third party market and are trying to make their product cheaper than Velodyne, who declined to give a price estimate for their lidar other than saying it would be in the “low thousands”. Jeffrey Owens, chief technology officer for Delphi, announced that “in five years, for ride-sharing cars, it could be an $8,000 [option]” and “in 2025, it could be $5,000.”

The artificial intelligence market is still new and on the rise and interest is expected to grow but as of now “the market isn’t there yet,” according to Velodyne’s president Mike Jellen. Before interest and trust in the product starts to rise the lidar needs to be perfected and the autonomous car need to be extremely safe. The car needs to pass all tests without a flaw because any wavering in its ability to drive safely could lead to injury or the loss of human life when these cars hit the road.

Featured Image via Flickr/torrez