The tech industry has spent the last decade asking whether self-driving cars will need lidar sensors, cameras, or all of the above. Lidar company Ouster says it has a new answer: put both on the same sensor.
On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced a new line of lidar sensors it calls Rev8, all of which offer “native color lidar.” These sensors can capture color images and three-dimensional depth data by performing the work of two sensors at the same time.
Ouster CEO Angus Pacala said his company has been in development for a decade, and in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, he’s not shy about his ambitions for the new product line, calling it “the holy grail of what a roboticist has always wanted.”
“It’s been like this for all of human history: you buy a lidar sensor, you buy a camera, and you try to figure out the combination with higher-order reasoning, and you spend a lot of time doing it,” he told TechCrunch. “And companies are really halfway there in terms of calibrating and connecting their data streams.”
Ouster’s new sensors change that equation, he said.
“The goal is to prevent cameras. There’s no reason why one sensor can’t do both,” he said.
The Rev8 lineup comes at a dynamic moment for lidar companies. Ouster’s acquisitions of Velodyne and Luminar marked a wave of consolidation that had been going on for several years. recently acquired assets in bankruptcy.
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At the same time, the sensor market is exploding. Waymo and others have finally deployed working robotaxis and are expanding rapidly. Robotics companies — humanoid and industrial — are raising capital and need sensors to make sense of the world. There is so much interest in the space that new companies such as Boston-based Teradar are emerging and testing the waters in entirely new ways. (In the case of teradar, it uses terahertz imaging.)
Color lidar, which combines accurate depth information with camera-quality image data, could be especially valuable to robotics players, Pacala said. He said Ouster worked with Fujifilm and imaging science company DXOMARK to understand “what it means to make a great camera.”
In fact, Pacala claims that Ouster’s color lidar “improves in many ways on a modern camera” thanks to the fact that the company already designs and builds its own sensors.
Ouster uses an architecture called “digital lidar”. Instead of an analog approach involving lots of moving parts, Ouster captures lidar data directly on its individual chip using what are known as single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors.
The company uses the same SPAD technology to capture color image data in the Rev8 sensors. Pacala said that this new technique allows him to make his image more sensitive than a conventional camera.
“It’s 48-bit color, 116dB dynamic range, like megapixel resolution. Those are top-of-the-line numbers that make it pound for pound for a good camera. But it just so happens that it comes as a pre-melted data stream, like a 3D color point cloud,” he said. “You can actually use the data as a camera stream, but that’s one of the strengths of this system, you can just use the lidar data stream, you can just use the camera data stream, or you can use the pre-combined data stream depending on how forward thinking your perception team is.”
Pacala said his company has already shipped samples to existing customers and is now accepting orders. He said he’s particularly proud of the OS1 Max sensor, which he says he considers “the best long-range lidar in the industry.” It can see 500 meters in all directions and is “significantly” smaller than other long-range lidars.
“We’ve had long-range LiDAR, but it hasn’t been like cutting edge,” he said. “It’s a big leap forward for Ouster. I think it means we’re going to start seeing more of this in high-speed robo-loading, robotaxi applications, I think a lot of drone products will move to OS1 Max.”
Other new lidars built on the Rev8 platform will include the OS0, OS1 and OSDome, according to the press release.
Ouster isn’t the only company starting to talk about color lidar. China’s Hesai announced this last month own color lidar platform says that it will go into mass production by the end of this year. Other companies, such as Innoviz, have previously presented their ideas on “color lidar”.
Pacala says that most other players trying to “bundle” cameras and lidar sensors lump them into one box. The approach used by Ouster (and Hesai, to be fair) places the lidar and imaging technology on the same chip.
This dramatically reduces the amount of work Ouster’s customers have to do to understand competing sensor streams, Pacala said, and it also forces those customers to eventually abandon cameras altogether — all while being cheaper and smaller than Ouster’s previous technology.
“It fundamentally changes the value proposition of what we sell to the customer from this stage forward,” he told TechCrunch.
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