ITS America is the premiere tradeshow to learn about new advancements in transportation technology nationwide. Experts with decades of experience as traffic engineers, DOT officials, and technology integrators understand that lidar brings distinct advantages over cameras and radar for traffic control. This year in Dallas, Texas, Ouster demonstrated powerful new software solutions built on their high-resolution digital lidar to improve the safety and efficiency of roadways.
Perception performance is critical to be able to perform actuation of traffic control signals and output accurate, useful data for signal performance measures (SPMs). With its high resolution, Ouster’s detection system not only detects the pedestrian, vehicle, or bicyclist, but also classifies the object accurately and continuously tracks it throughout the monitored space. Lidar also provides deterministic distance data, meaning the exact location of every object is measured rather than calculated. Camera technology can detect and classify objects in ideal weather conditions, but require inference to determine the estimated location (and therefore speed) in space of objects, leading to inconsistencies that output inaccurate SPM insights. Radar technology provides deterministic distance data in all weather conditions, but it does not have high enough resolution to detect slow and/or smaller objects such as pedestrians and provide accurate classification, a critical parameter in ITS applications focused on the safety of vulnerable road users.
Data robustness in any weather or lighting condition is key to this industry since systems are always operating outdoors. Cities cannot risk safety just because it is raining or snowing on any day. And with 75 per cent of pedestrian fatalities occurring in low-light conditions, camera technologies simply cannot move the needle of safety in our cities. Ouster’s lidar penetrates environmental obscurants to maintain high detection performance in all weather conditions. And compared to cameras that can be blinded by sun glare or headlights, lidar operates outside the visible spectrum and therefore is unaffected by harsh lighting or complete darkness.
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Ouster his also providing lidars for Robo-taxi fleets; Motional, a global leader in driverless technology, has chosen Ouster as the exclusive supplier of long-range lidar sensors for an all-electric Ioniq 5-based robo-taxi fleet. Under the serial production agreement, Ouster will supply Motional with Alpha Prime™ VLS-128 sensors through 2026.
