During a tech talk organised last week, Continental and AEye presented their strategy and their products. Last October, Continental made a minority investment in AEye and said at the time the mission was to “industrialise and commercialise this technology for automated driving at SAE levels 3 and higher” and that Continental and AEye would focus on both passenger and commercial vehicles.
The short-range lidar is fully designed by Continental. For the long-range lidar, Continental have a partnership with AEYE, while automaker sales and OE design will be done via Continental.
“At Continental, we believe lidar has a full place in the sensor fleet for higher automation of vehicles, and we believe the market will develop very similar to what we know from our radar business,” says Gunnar Juergens, Continental VP and head of lidar segment.
HFL110 Short Range lidar
The innovative high-resolution 3D flash lidar is a solution that works with other ADAS sensors to achieve highly and fully automated driving. It is a solid-state unit meant for L2+ and L3 AVs.
Continental will start production of the HFL110 later this year.
HRL131 Long Range lidar
The HRL131 is a MEMS-based agile lidar with software-configurable scan patterns, Deterministic Detection Logic (DDL), reduced power consumption, and high performance in rain, fog, snow, and dust. It can detect vehicles at a distance of 300 metres and objects on the road at about 160 m.
Continental don’t plan to start producing this long-range lidar device until 2024, but already are calling the sensor the “final piece of the puzzle” when it comes to autonomous vehicles navigating complex environments. And they aren’t saying yet which automaker they’re working with to introduce the HRL 131—they’ve revealed only that they will launch the product with a “premium” automaker in three years’ time.
VSI made an ananalysis of AEye’s lidar system in long range, high-resolution performance and safety required for automotive and trucking highway autonomy:
Range: Greater than 1000m on a variety of vehicles, while maintaining a 10Hz scan rate (10 frames per second).
Resolution: 1600 points per square degree at 200m on any object across the Field of View (FOV). Delivering ultra-high resolution enables vehicles to quickly and accurately identify and classify threats, especially small objects.
Speed: Scan rates of 10Hz to over 200Hz (200 frames per second) for full Field of View (FOV) – By scanning at 10X-20X the speed of conventional LiDAR, AEye’s system provides a unique ability to scan lateral entry from pedestrians or vehicles.
Sensor Integration Flexibility: Mounted behind first surfaces, including the windshield, with less than 10% observable degradation in performance.
AEye is the premier provider of high-performance, active lidar systems for vehicle autonomy, ADAS, and robotic vision applications. AEye’s software-definable iDAR™ (Intelligent Detection and Ranging) platform combines solid-state active lidar, an optionally fused low-light HD camera, and integrated deterministic artificial intelligence to capture more intelligent information with less data, enabling faster, more accurate, and more reliable perception.
