Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The lidar industry has been a bit lively recently. In less than a week, the two largest lidar companies in China have successively released their own solid-state blind lidar products.

On November 2, Hesai Technology officially released the pure solid-state close-up blind lidar FT120 for ADAS front-loaded production vehicles. On November 7, Suiteng Juchuang also released an all-solid-state blind lidar RS-LiDAR-E1 based on self-developed chips and a new technology platform on its Tech Day, which is also for mass production. As early as May, LightRoad Intelligence has taken the lead in releasing its first generation of pure solid-state lateral blind lidar product LDSatellite.

Domestic manufacturers have laid out the development route of lidar mainly from mechanical to semi-solid to pure solid. As the name implies, mechanical lidar is called mechanical lidar because of its mechanical rotating structure. It is characterized by high detection accuracy and a 360 °field of view angle, which can effectively reduce the number of radars carried. But it is precisely because of the moving mechanical structure inside, so the service life is short, and it is not suitable to be loaded on household vehicles that need to adapt to complex road conditions.

Semi-solid lidar is mainly divided into three technical solutions: MEMS, prism and rotating mirror. At present, the most mainstream is the MEMS scheme, which only has a moving part of the micro mirror, which can better take into account both functionality and durability. At present, the mass production vehicles are mainly equipped with MEMS semi-solid lidar, such as Suteng Juchuang M1, carried in Xiaopeng G9, Weima M7, Guangzhou Automobile Ean LX Plus, Zhiji L7 and other models.

Although the semi-solid lidar has greatly reduced the internal mechanical moving parts, there are still deficiencies in reliability and durability. Therefore, in the short term, semi-solid lidar is still the mainstream scheme in production vehicles, but in the long run, pure solid-state lidar is the future trend.

The characteristic of the pure solid-state lidar is that there are no moving parts inside, and the light emission and reception are completed entirely through the chip, and the total number of components is greatly reduced compared with the traditional lidar, thus greatly improving the detection performance and product reliability. In addition, due to the highly integrated structure, the pure solid-state lidar can be relatively small and convenient to be installed on the front and rear wing, door or front of the car.

The Wesai FT120 has a 100 °x 75 °ultra-wide angle FOV with a maximum range of 100m. It can detect not only high road signs, railings, three-dimensional garage mezzanine, etc., but also low children, pets, cones, zebra crossings and so on. With a point frequency of 192000 points per second (in single echo mode) and a global resolution of 160 (H) x120 (V), rich object details can be detected.

Suteng Juchuang E1 has a horizontal FOV of 120 °and a vertical FOV of 90 °. It supports an ultra-high refresh frame rate that exceeds 25Hz, and the target acceleration can be sensed in 200ms. The ranging capability is 30m @ 10%, and the maximum range is 120m.

In terms of detection level, Suiteng Juchuang said that on the basis of the current mainstream forward-looking lidar horizontal 120 °FOV, the overall sensing solution only needs two E1 to achieve seamless stitching of the 360 °horizontal field of view. At the same time, 90 °vertical FOV can be as close to the car body as possible along the lower edge of the field of view, and compress the ground blind area of the perceptual area to less than 20cm, and the ranging ability of 30m can fully detect tangential incoming vehicles outside 6 lanes. Effectively cover the two-way 12-lane intersection scene.

However, at present, the pure solid-state lidar also has some shortcomings, mainly because of its low power density and short detection distance, so it is not suitable to be used as the main detection radar, mainly used to fill the blind on both sides. The advantage of semi-solid lidar is distance measurement, but the vertical field of view angle is usually small, so it can complement and cooperate with pure solid-state lidar in blind area monitoring. At present, the mainstream solution is pure solid-state blind lidar with long-distance semi-solid lidar to form a complete vehicle-level lidar solution, such as Wesai FT120+AT128; Quick Tengtuang E1+M1.

The sharp contrast between the domestic and foreign lidar industry and the domestic lidar industry is the loneliness of several foreign established lidar and autopilot enterprises.

On September 30, Ibeo, the originator of the car lidar, posted a notice on its website that the company had filed for bankruptcy with the court in Hamburg, Germany, because it was unable to obtain further financing, and the local court had approved to administer the bankruptcy proceedings on its own. Ibeo hopes to protect the company and as many jobs as possible through bankruptcy proceedings, and its more than 400 employees are currently paid only enough to last until the end of November.

On Nov. 8, two other lidar-listed companies, Ouster and Velodyne, reached an all-stock merger agreement, announcing that the two companies were about to merge because they were out of money.

It is reported that the total market capitalization of the combined company is about 400 million US dollars. Ouster and Velodyne said in a statement that the two companies had a combined cash balance of about $355 million as of September 30 this year, and they plan to achieve at least $75 million in annualized cost savings within nine months of the merger. After the merger, the two sides will jointly seek a faster profit model.

Ouster's share price has fallen 77 per cent since the beginning of 2022, while Velodyne's share price has fallen 80 per cent this year.

The most important reason why so many foreign lidar enterprises are unable to maintain is nothing more than profit, which makes domestic enterprises much happier.

According to Hosai Technology, its semi-solid lidar AT128 has obtained a set point of production for a total of millions of models owned by several top mainframe factories, including ideal, Changan, Jidu, Gaohe, Lutes and so on, and delivered more than 10,000 in September and October in a row. The newly released pure solid-state laser blind radar FT120 has also obtained more than 1 million sets of mass production from a number of mainframe factories, and is expected to be mass-produced in the second half of 2023.

Suiteng Juchuang also announced its mass production and delivery. By the end of this year, it has obtained more than 50 fixed-point vehicle orders from BYD, GAC Ean, FAW Red Flag, Chery Automobile, Great Wall Automobile, Xiaopeng Automobile, Polar Krypton Intelligent Technology, Weimar Automobile, Lutes Technology, Lucid and other enterprises. By the end of this year, 11 model projects will enter SOP.

The conclusion is different from Tesla's pure visual perception scheme, the new forces in China adopt the vision + lidar fusion perception scheme, which will greatly increase the number of lidar vehicles.

According to the 2022 Automotive Lidar Industry Research report (domestic) released by Zoz Auto Research, in the first half of 2022, the lidar installation of new passenger vehicles in China reached 24700; in the second half of 2022, more than 10 new lidar vehicles are to be delivered, including Xiaopeng G9 and Weima M7, and the total installation volume is expected to exceed 80,000 in the whole year.

Domestic lidar enterprises have driven to the fast lane.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.