Dr. Hassan Moussa joined Valeo in 2018 as head of global lidar R&D. He is currently leading the global R&D teams working on platforms and customer projects. Dr. Moussa has more than 24 years of professional expertise, and spoke with us in the runup to the forthcoming DVN Lidar Conference.
DVN: You will be a speaker at the 2nd DVN Conference on automotive lidar. Can you give us a short preview of your presentation?
Dr. Moussa: I will be focussing on the story behind the Valeo Scala, the world’s first automotive-grade lidar on the market. The challenges in design and manufacturing that sets aside a product compliant with automotive requirements from the rest of the market. And finally the second generation of the product that will go next year in serial production.
During the last decades, optomechatronics has enabled a lot of innovation in automotive industry; one of these innovations is lidar. With its ability to provide high-resolution three-dimensional information about the environment, lidar can provide a highly dense point cloud enabling accurate 3D data even for very difficult scenarios and severe environmental conditions. The democratisation of lidar, coming from our first automotive grade sensor, will lead step by step to cost reduction and volume increase, and as a result more safety and more confidence to move to higher levels of automation.
DVN: What will be the ambition of your company with regards to the future of automotive lidar?
Dr. Moussa: Valeo today has the widest portfolio of sensors in automotive field, with ultrasonic, front and rear cameras as well as surrounding view, and the automotive-grade lidar on the market, we are enabling the vehicle to see what the human eye cannot always fully distinguish, from just a few cm to more than 250 m away. For that in the coming years we will focus on reducing packaging and increasing performance.
