Fast Company has a nice article up about Aurora, with a particular emphasis on its proprietary first-light lidar. The sub-headling is “The Pittsburgh startup is pinning its hopes on a far-seeing lidar sensor.”
Four or five years back, a lot of AV companies were buying up sensor start-ups, although it was often hard to tell whether the acquisitions were focused on the sensor product or were purely acquihires.
Aurora has evidently stuck with its in-house FirstLight lidar sensor, and claims that sensor can see up to 1300 feet (400 meters). It’s always hard to know what to make of lidar metrics, because of the quantity vs. quality trade-off. You can configure the sensor to get a single lidar point at very long range, but at the cost of field of view, and also lots of false positive returns.
A lidar that got high-quality data at 400 m would be great. Although Aurora’s own blog post on the topic hints at the trade-offs involved.
An FMCW lidar sensor may only receive a few returns on an object 300m away, but if those hits give a velocity value of interest (e.g., moving towards the vehicle at >70 mph) our perception system knows the object is important because it is approaching quickly.
In any case, it’s interesting that while many AV companies have spun down their sensor acquisitions and gone with vendored components, Aurora is touting its in-house sensor.
David Silver 