Cepton have unveiled their new top-of-the-line automotive lidar, called Ultra. They say it is the world’s slimmest adaptive, long-range lidar, designed based on real automaker requirements for next-generation consumer vehicle ADAS and automated driving capabilities. It leverages Cepton’s latest innovation, MagnoSteer, and boasts these specifications:
- Maximum detection range: 300 m at 10 per cent reflectivity
- Angular resolution: 0.05° × 0.05° within regions of interest
- Field of view: 120°H × 25°V maximum, software-definable
- Typical Power consumption: 12 W
- Data rate: up to 3.8 million points per second
- Size: 150W × 24H × 90D mm
“With the introduction of Ultra, we are proud to reveal MagnoSteer, our next generation of lidar imaging technology,” said Brunno Moretti, Senior Vice President of Product and Commercial Operations at Cepton. “MagnoSteer is a revolutionary beam steering mechanism with maximized field of view efficiency. This means that it minimizes the time, space and energy wasted within the architecture as it generates extremely dense point clouds, resulting in impressive data rate from an extremely small package. It is frictionless, automotive-grade and has an infinite mechanical life. It consumes less than half the power of typical scanning systems that deliver comparable performance, while taking up as little as one-fourth of the space.
“Powered by MagnoSteer, Ultra breaks the performance bottleneck of 905 nm lidars while taking advantage of a mature, mass-market-ready laser technology. With a 300 m detection range at 10 per cent reflectivity, it can detect and locate a dark object, such as a black car, at a distance 50 per cent further than what is typically required for automotive collision prevention systems to properly react. All of this is achieved without the need for fibre laser components, which are associated with high costs, low maturity, poor reliability and excessive power consumption for automotive applications. Ultra presents the ultimate solution that the automotive industry needs today: top-notch performance coupled with superior scalability”.
Ultra is by far the smallest, slimmest high-performance automotive lidar on the market today. Similar performing lidar systems are typically triple the volume and double the height. With its extremely compact form factor and power efficiency, Ultra is designed for seamless integration into various locations on a vehicle without the need for an additional cooling system. It can be embedded behind the windshield and into the roofline, the headlamps and the fascia, enabling high-precision perception for various automotive use cases.
