Self-driving cars getting new eyes as GM buys lidar startup Strobe

Autonomous vehicle trainer Alex Kexel (right) and operations team lead Roy Ysmael (second from left) prepare cars for test drives at Cruise Automation, an autonomous driving car company in the SOMA district of San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 14, 2017. less Autonomous vehicle trainer Alex Kexel (right) and operations team lead Roy Ysmael (second from left) prepare cars for test drives at Cruise Automation, an autonomous driving car company in the SOMA district of ... more Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Self-driving cars getting new eyes as GM buys lidar startup Strobe 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

Cruise Automation’s self-driving cars are about to get a new set of eyes.

General Motors, which purchased Cruise last year, announced Monday that it is buying Strobe, a Pasadena startup that makes lidar, a laser-based sensor that most autonomous vehicles use to see the world around them. Strobe’s 11 employees will now work with Cruise to perfect the technology.

Strobe’s lidar technology, accord to Cruise, functions on a single computer chip and has the potential to slash lidar costs by 99 percent.

“The idea that lidar is too costly or exotic to use in a commercial product is now a thing of the past,” said Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt Monday. He did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Although the price of the sensors has plunged in recent years, designing an affordable lidar is considered essential to mass-producing autonomous cars. The sensors, which work by bouncing laser beams off objects to gauge their shape and distance, once cost $70,000 per unit, while newer models retail for about $8,000. Many self-driving cars use multiple lidar units, in addition to radar and cameras.

Lidar units have also shrunk dramatically in size from their earlier versions, which had the shape of a fried-chicken bucket. Industry leader Velodyne of San Jose offers a unit roughly the size of two hockey pucks stacked atop each other.

Strobe’s technology has the potential for even smaller sensors. A blog post Vogt published Monday shows an image of a prototype Strobe lidar that is roughly as long as a Sharpie pen. The commercialized version, he said, should be even more compact.

“You can see even a sensor like that is much easier to integrate into a vehicle body,” he said during a call with reporters.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Strobe was co-founded in 2014 by longtime Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer Lute Maleki. One of its board members, Tony Tether, used to run a series of self-driving car races for the federal government — the DARPA challenges — that helped create the autonomous vehicle industry. Many of the Bay Area engineers now developing autonomous vehicles got their start at the DARPA challenges.

Strobe and Cruise researchers will work together at HRL, formerly known as Hughes Research Labs, to develop the lidar. Located in Malibu, HRL performs research for both GM and Boeing.

David R. Baker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dbaker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @DavidBakerSF