Silicon Valley Startup Enterprise Luminar Receives $36 Million Seed Round Financing
The camera can help the driverless vehicle to recognize the street signs and the traffic lights. But LiDAR (laser detection and measurement) can sense obstacles and help cars avoid obstacles.
Recently, a company named Luminar Technologies raised $36 million in seed rounds to launch a high-resolution LiDAR sensor. The company will start producing lasers, receivers, chips, packaging, etc. from scratch rather than assembling them with off-the-shelf components.
Luminar's investors include ARCHina Capital, Canvas Ventures, GVA Capital and Peter Thiel of the 1517 Fund. According to Luminar's CEO and co-founder, Austin Russell, the company's LiDAR enables cars to observe obstructions in more detail and farther away than other systems on the market. LiLAR can also work in bad weather, whether it is heavy fog or dust. The company did not disclose the price of the sensor.
The company’s competitors in the field of driverless cars include Quanergy, Velodyne, and Alphabeto’s Waymo, the automotive division of the company. Russell, 22, is confident that he can use his company's technical performance to beat his competitors.
Russell remembered the periodic table of elements at the age of 2 and applied for his first patent when he was 12 years old. After receiving a $ 100,000 Thiel Fellowship (for which the entrepreneurial scholarship must be dropped out), he dropped out of Stanford.
He once said: “My role model is mainly in the fields of physics and engineering. I admire great people such as Newton, Tesla, and Einstein. They propose a new angle of thinking and promote the development of the entire field, not Some specific technologies are progressively improved."
Russell pointed out that the problem that LiDAR developers are trying to solve is that the price is too high. Many automotive-grade LiDARs cost tens of thousands of dollars. Luminar hopes to make higher-performance sensors, not simply to make them easier to manufacture and cheaper, even if special materials are used or operate at wavelengths different from the industry standard.
In a demonstration by Luminar, the employees arranged on the road the mannequins of different heights wearing different colors of clothes, fake deer of the same size as the real deer, car tires, road signs, and put them every 25 meters. At the end of this 200-meter journey, Luminar put a large canvas painted black.
The company purchased vehicles from BMW, Mercedes, Tesla, and other dealers, and installed LiDAR sensors in the vehicle to test the sensors at the test site. The information collected by LiDAR is sent back to the monitor in real time. The monitor screen shows the environment around the car.
The Luminar system was operated by Jason Eichenholz, the company's CTO and co-founder. The screen clearly delineated the environment of the test site: At a distance of 100 meters, a cyclist wandered around the road and a small pigeon suddenly appeared. The car in front of them was 40 meters; the appearance of the mannequin was clearly displayed on the screen, even in dark clothing; the black canvas at the end was also recorded.
In contrast, the flow of data from other LiDAR manufacturers will only show a few points or a thin line to indicate that an object is in front. Other systems do not recognize objects, nor can they detect dark walls and cannot find models wearing dark clothes. Early LiDAR sensors only showed conditions that occurred in the range of 35 to 50 meters.
Luminar's LiDARs can emit millions of laser pulses per second. They give the vehicle a 120-degree field of view and also allow optical zooming or more concentrated analysis of any obstacles near the car.
Russell said: “If you notice, many unmanned vehicles are limited to 25 miles per hour. These things are like delivery robots or robots in warehouses. When the speed is 75 miles per hour, Our sensors can still observe objects in a range of 200 meters, which means that there are approximately 7 seconds for the car to react, while other LiDARs have only a one second response time."
Rebecca Lynn, partner of Canvas VC, one of Luminar's investors, said that now the company is putting products into the market, she hopes that Luminar will become the main "strategic player" in the automotive field. In fact, Luminar’s CEO said that there have been car companies that have purchased all LiDARs that Luminar plans to produce in its first round regardless of price. The first round of production will begin this year.
The company is using some of its important seed round funding to build a 50,000-square-foot factory in Orlando, Fla. But its headquarters is still in Potola Valley, California.
Lynn said: "Although some people think that driverless cars can only rely on the camera to perceive, LiDAR will be able to save more lives than any other technology being developed. There are many things that will make our life easier or Better, but with technology in mind, it's the autonomous driving technology that can really save lives. Without LiDAR, you can't have completely safe automatic driving.â€
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