Autonomous driving and LiDAR open up a $6 trillion market

Nowadays, the "arms race" among various car companies focuses on the release of L3 autonomous driving models, and the field of autonomous driving is surging. Whether it is the increasing maturity of technical systems and solutions, the evolutionary breakthroughs in the performance of sensors such as lidar, or the gradual completion of the upstream and downstream supply chains of the industry, they are all telling people: we are getting closer and closer to true unmanned driving - L5 autonomous driving.

The huge development potential of autonomous driving has made all players in and outside the industry eager to make a move. Not to mention the fields of vehicle manufacturing and related equipment application, which are highly related to autonomous driving, even the travel service market is eagerly looking forward to the future of driverless driving. Someone in the travel service industry said: "If it completely replaces the existing online ride-hailing vehicles, Robotaxi will grow into a huge track of 600 billion US dollars." Robotaxi refers to the autonomous online ride-hailing vehicles.

Five years have passed, and the autonomous driving track is crowded with more and more players, some of which are already ahead, while others are trying to widen the gap.

But you have to eat one bite at a time. Now that the L3 mass production stage has just begun, the autonomous driving industry still needs to "take a few steps" to achieve true driverless driving. The existence of LiDAR allows car companies to walk more leisurely on the journey from L3 to L5, which is close or far.

At present, the development of self-driving cars has ushered in the best era and has been unprecedentedly optimistic in the market. IHS predicts that by 2035, more than 50% of vehicles on the road will be self-driving, and the total revenue scale of self-driving vehicles and related equipment applications will exceed US$500 billion.

According to a report from McKinsey's Future Mobility Research Center, a large amount of capital, expectations and publicity are emerging in the domestic market surrounding autonomous driving.

A large number of Chinese companies, including Beike Tianhui, SenseTime, Horizon Robotics, Jingchi, and NavInfo, are working on developing the core components of autonomous driving technology architecture, including lidar, cameras, processors, software, and maps/location-based services. Between 2012 and 2017, about $7 billion in venture capital was invested in Chinese autonomous driving technology companies, an amount comparable to the amount invested in U.S. startups during the same period.

The report also paints a picture of a future where "driverless driving will revolutionize the experience and way of using cars":

The popularization of driverless cars will reduce the incidence of traffic accidents by more than 90%, and the driving environment will be safer and smoother. The unbundling of vehicles and drivers will allow people with disabilities who cannot drive or are not convenient to learn to drive to travel independently. In addition, not only will the concept of cars be rewritten with the popularization of driverless cars, but the travel service market will also undergo more earth-shaking changes.

In the entire transportation industry, the travel service market dominated by online ride-hailing has never stopped exploring driverless vehicles. Since 2015, Robotaxi (self-driving taxis) have been intensively tested on the road, and even e-commerce giants such as Amazon have entered this field. Someone in the travel service industry said: "If it completely replaces the existing online ride-hailing, Robotaxi will grow into a huge market worth $6 trillion."

Judging from the numbers, the expected market space for future travel services is enough to make players in the field crazy. But for now, autonomous driving still needs efforts in many aspects to evolve into true unmanned driving and mature and popularize it, so that this $6 trillion "cake" can be seen and eaten.

There are two hurdles that must be overcome on the road to realizing driverless cars: cost and safety and reliability.

The high cost of autonomous driving systems has long been the biggest bottleneck affecting their development. As early as 1984, DARPA began research on autonomous driving technology, but exploratory research and development at no cost was destined to fail in the commercial field. It was not until today, 37 years later, that L3 autonomous driving vehicles were mass-produced. As for L5 "true driverless cars", according to a McKinsey survey: only 27% of the respondents believed that the cost issue would be resolved and mass production would be achieved before 2025.

Perception performance, reliability and safety are another major bottleneck in promoting autonomous driving technology. Autonomous driving will completely replace human intervention, which naturally places extremely high demands on its reliability and safety. If true autonomous driving is to be achieved, all components of the autonomous driving system must continue to evolve iteratively to achieve performance that completely replaces human intervention and far exceeds human intervention.

In terms of hardware, among all the sensors required for the autonomous driving system, LiDAR has the best perception performance. LiDAR can quickly obtain a large amount of position point information within the detection range by emitting and receiving high-frequency lasers, and perform three-dimensional modeling through the point cloud composed of position points to obtain information such as the distance, shape, contour, and movement speed of objects in the target area.

The reflectivity of laser signals varies between different materials. LiDAR does not require very complex supporting algorithms to accurately distinguish obstacles of different materials within the detection range. Compared with the logic of visual perception that judges objects by color, it greatly improves perception accuracy.

Based on the above advantages, LiDAR is widely recognized by the industry as a core sensor that is essential for high-level autonomous driving. Prior to this, LiDAR has been widely used in vehicles other than passenger cars, ranging from scenic area shuttles and unmanned logistics vehicles to sweeping robots and reception robots.

At present, LiDAR has become the standard configuration of the perception systems of most autonomous and driverless cars, which are in mass production, about to be mass produced, under testing, or even still in the PPT stage. The LiDAR industry has also started to grow explosively when autonomous driving is in its infancy.

With the breakthroughs in recent years, domestic and foreign LiDAR manufacturers have successively launched LiDAR products that are expected to open the door to driverless cars. For example, the image-level ultra-high-resolution solid-state LiDAR C-Fans-256 released by Beike Tianhui not long ago is the world's first 256-line automotive-grade solid-state LiDAR.

LiDAR, known as the "eye of autonomous driving", has become the "key man" among all kinds of sensors required for autonomous driving systems, playing an irreplaceable and important role in solving problems such as cost, performance, safety and reliability.

C-Fans-256 has a resolution of 0.1°x0.1°, and can accurately capture pedestrians and vehicles at a distance of 200m, making it easy to monitor large-scale long-distance areas. Compared with human vision and even environmental monitoring sensors such as millimeter-wave radar, it is more "observant". With its all-round scanning field of view, the vehicle can always keep abreast of the surrounding road conditions during driving. For difficult driving scenes such as unprotected left turns, it can take good care of vehicles or pedestrians coming from the right.

With the powerful abnormal event capture capability granted by the ultra-high frame rate of sports cameras, C-Fans-256 can calmly deal with emergencies such as high-speed emergency braking and ghosting, which have extremely short response times and even exceed the limit of human physiological function response.

With 8-bit grayscale resolution, C-Fans-256 can clearly identify lane lines around the clock, whether it is late at night without street lights or at dusk with haze all over the sky.

C-Fans-256 also consumes less power than household ceiling lamps, and has passed ISO16750's 9 categories and 31 tests to meet high automotive standards. It can work stably and normally in harsh environments such as extreme cold and heat, high temperature and humidity, and rugged and bumpy. In addition, C-Fans-32, which is in the same series as C-Fans-256, is currently the only LiDAR product that has passed the "intrinsic safety" certification. It can operate safely not only on conventional roads, but also in high-risk environments such as coal mines that are flammable and explosive.

Due to the evolution of performance parameters, market demand has increased, effectively sharing the R&D costs of precision optical devices in LiDAR, and the bulk quotations of LiDAR products on the market have been reduced again and again. Beike Tianhui, which has successfully independently developed 24 chips in 5 categories and has achieved complete independent control of core components, naturally also gave a surprise discount on the bulk purchase price of C-Fans-256, an excellent automotive-grade LiDAR product, making LiDAR no longer an expensive "toy for a few people".

From 2007 to 2017, China's passenger car market grew at an annual rate of 16%, and its share of the global passenger car market increased from 9% in 2007 to 30% in 2017. China has become the world's largest vehicle and travel service market, and is likely to become the world's largest autonomous driving market in the future. Whether it is a car company or a travel service player, if they want to get more of the cake in the future when driverless cars become popular, laser radar products such as Beike Tianhui C-Fans-256 are indispensable.