Lidar can finally stop being ugly.

Wosai released 25mm ultra-thin lidar to realize the leap of lidar from the outside to the inside! ?

Wenshu Home Wang Huang Hua Dan

At the last communication meeting, some media asked CEO Li Yifan, what do you think of integrating lidar on the windshield? At that time, Li Yifan's answer was actually noncommittal.

A few months later, on April 14, wosai officially released its latest product, the ultra-thin long-range main lidar ET25, which was installed in the engine room and separated from the outside world by a windshield.

Although it has been known in advance that Wosai will launch ultra-thin new products, although some people have mentioned such plans, it is still a bit unexpected to see the real thing.

From the outside to the inside of the car, it can be said that ET25 has a groundbreaking significance in the development of lidar. It solves several main problems of lidar.

The first thing to bear is the face value. The installation position of ET25 on the real vehicle is between the rearview mirror and the windshield. From the outside, the presence of lidar is really weak. However, from the inside of the car, the shell is relatively large. I wonder if it will be more exquisite in the future.

To be honest, I'm really tired of the design of one big bag, two big bags, or even three big bags on my head. Li Yifan said that a semi-member of the automobile industry like him is "ostensibly" willing to pay the face value of the car, and I believe many people will not be more superficial than him. Good-looking, actually quite important.

Moreover, after replacing the lidar with a car, the drag coefficient of the car will be greatly reduced.

Second, there is actually some overlap with the first one, that is, the installation position of the lidar. Installed on the bumper, the position is low, the field of vision is easily blocked, and it is easily affected by ground dust, mud and water pollution, which affects the perception effect. If it is installed overhead, it will affect the appearance of the vehicle, and it will also face the problem of cleaning the lidar outside the vehicle. The scheme installed behind the windshield will not affect the face value at first, and the height is moderate, so there is no need to worry about cleaning.

Thirdly, although ET25 has achieved an extremely thin effect of 25mm, its performance has not been affected. Without windshield, the measuring distance can reach 250m at 10% reflectivity, and even with windshield, the measuring distance of ET25 can reach 225m at 10% reflectivity. The FOV of ET25 is 120 (H) x 25 (V), the spot frequency exceeds 3 million per second, and the minimum resolution is only? 0.05 x 0.05 has better performance than Jose's flagship lidar AT 128.

Of course, it is not without problems.

Because the traditional automobile glass is installed behind the windshield, the signal attenuation of near-infrared laser emitted by lidar will be serious when it meets the glass, which can not meet the requirements of ranging and resolution. Therefore, Hesse's solution needs to be matched with a special windshield.

Li Yifan did not explain the principle in detail, but only mentioned the need for special coating treatment on glass. On the same day, Wosai also announced the strategic cooperation with Fuyao Glass. Therefore, this scheme actually needs the cooperation of laser radar and glass manufacturers.

First of all, this will inevitably put forward requirements for the quality of point clouds. Although, judging from the point cloud pictures released by Vosai, the quality of laser point cloud has been greatly improved compared with ordinary glass after using special windshield, but it is still slightly worse than that without windshield. The actual effect depends on the measured performance.

Secondly, it is also the cost problem that lidar is constantly mentioned. On the one hand, the cost increase caused by the special windshield, on the other hand, the lidar itself. Both the product itself and the engineering installation have relatively higher requirements, which will inevitably bring cost considerations.

However, Li Yifan said thAT at present, Voser has not made a final offer for ET25, but he thinks it will not be significantly more expensive than AT.

In order to put ET25 into the cockpit, Jose solved several technical problems.

The first is thinness. If you want to put the lidar in the cockpit, you need to leave a certain space between it and the windshield. No entry zone (KOZ). The thicker the sensor, what is needed? KOZ？ The bigger it is. Like what? 25 mm？ Thick? ET25, what else? 45 mm？ Compared with other long-range lidar, its thickness? KOZ？ It's more than half smaller. Because the sensor bracket is placed above the driver, the smaller KOZ? It can occupy less cockpit space and effectively reduce the impact on the driver's vision.

Therefore, only the laser radar as thin as ET25, integrated on the rear side of the windshield, can ensure driving safety and bring a wider field of vision and more comfortable cabin space.

Jose can make ET25 so thin, thanks to its new generation of self-developed transceiver chip, and the more advanced laser transceiver module has improved the sensitivity of ET25 receiver chip several times, thus improving the ranging ability of 905 nm lidar to objects with 10% reflectivity to more than 250 m..

However, at present, Jose did not disclose more information about the specific technical route of ET25.

Secondly, ET25 also achieves lower power consumption. Li Yifan said that the power consumption of Jose AT 128 is 18W, while that of ET25 is 12W, so the heat dissipation performance is excellent. Even in hot summer, it can work continuously in the cabin for a long time and maintain high performance.

Because the cockpit is a closed space when the car is driving, the air is not easy to circulate, and the temperature in the cabin will rise rapidly in high temperature weather. Especially after direct sunlight, the rearview mirror can easily become very hot. If the power of the laser radar itself is too high, it will bring serious heat dissipation problems and cannot be integrated into the cabin at all.

Moreover, because it is installed in the cabin, it also puts forward higher requirements for the noise problem of lidar when it works. Li Yifan said that the noise of ET25 in the engine room is less than 25 decibels, which is lower than that of a quiet library, and it can fully meet the needs of installation in the engine room.

However, the mass production time of ET25 is still relatively late. Li Yifan said that it is expected to be in 25/26 years, but 24 years is not impossible, depending on the rhythm of the OEM. Obviously, a product needs to solve many problems from the development stage to the formal mass production stage.

However, judging from the current release, ET25 is really eye-catching.

So, does Jose's release of ultra-thin ET25 mean giving up the AT 128 with a height of 48mm and a larger volume? Li Yifan made it clear that it would not. AT is a flagship high-resolution product, and the performance of the next generation AT will definitely be higher than ET25.

In addition, Li Yifan thinks that lidar doesn't need to be very thin, and Jose's ET25 just gives OEMs one more choice. The difference between ET and AT, just like notebook and desktop, has its own reasons.

Starting from ET25, lidar will no longer be just a possibility outside the car. Finally, you can stop being ugly!

Write at the end:

At the communication meeting, Li Yifan spent a lot of time talking about some of Wosay's ideas on lidar, which was very frank, and it was also a response to the problems faced by the current lidar market.

Since the beginning of the year, Vosay was listed on NASDAQ and became the first domestic lidar listed in the United States, Vosay has been at the forefront. Why is it listed on the US stock market? What do you think of the stock price? And will the continuous price war in the auto market since the beginning of the year eliminate lidar? Also, do users need lidar or not? Is lidar just a safety redundancy or a necessity?

Some of these questions are unanswerable, while others are different. However, Li Yifan made it clear that the price of lidar will not necessarily drop to the price of cabbage. He believes that the final cost of a thing depends on how much, not entirely determined by technology. Technology often has room for further exploration, but the real decisive factor is how much value and value creation system it has created.

If the value of lidar for intelligent driving is 10%, then the cost of an intelligent driving system should account for 10%, which is unnecessary and should not be lower.

Moreover, he believes that the OEM's knowledge of lidar has changed from safety redundancy to "a necessary part of realizing some functions", which is a good thing.

Li Yifan spent a lot of time talking about the improvement of the security of the scheme with lidar compared with the scheme without lidar. Logically speaking, this is completely correct. However, in the current market, ordinary users' perception of lidar and its security improvement is not so obvious.

Both the development of technology and the maturity of the market take time. In fact, no one can assert that a road has not come to an end

Li Yifan thinks that the mass production of lidar in the domestic market will start in 2023, while in the international market, it should be in 2025.

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