LiDAR helps smart driving and opens a new era of driving

At the beginning of 2024, the automobile market was full of smoke, and major automobile companies launched price wars to seize market opportunities. In this fierce competition, a striking phenomenon gradually emerged: the price of models equipped with lidar has dropped significantly compared with 2023. Today, the lowest price of lidar models on the market has reached the 150,000 yuan mark, and the prices of many popular lidar models have also dropped further, entering the price range of 200,000 to 300,000 yuan. This price change not only enriches consumers' choices, but also greatly promotes the popularization of intelligent driving technology.

Currently, the mainstream smart driving solutions on the market are mainly divided into two types: lidar + camera + millimeter wave radar and camera + millimeter wave radar. Although the price of the lidar version is 10,000-20,000 yuan higher than that of the camera version, what is remarkable is that the optional proportion of the lidar version in the past year has been as high as 70-80%.

This data not only demonstrates consumers' deep interest and high recognition of lidar, an advanced sensor, but also reflects that consumers' demand and awareness for driving safety are gradually increasing.They are willing to pay extra for higher safety performance and choose models equipped with lidar to ensure better perception and more reliable safety in complex traffic environments.

With the rise of lidar models, major automotive media have carried out comparative tests between vision + millimeter wave radar solutions and lidar solution models. The test results are impressive,LiDAR has demonstrated significant advantages in multiple testing sessions.

In the nighttime snow assisted driving test, an environment with white snowy roads and white static fake cars was set up to test the performance of vision + millimeter wave radar models and lidar solution models.

Under dark light conditions, the visual perception system faces severe challenges. The camera's perception ability is significantly reduced, making it difficult to recognize targets and accurately judge the vehicle objects in front and the distance between the two vehicles. At the same time, millimeter-wave radar relies on the reflection, diffuse reflection and scattering effects of the object surface during detection. For white static fake cars with low reflectivity, it is easy to misjudge them as clutter and filter them out.

The next test is to add an opposite backlight test session in the same road environment.

In the backlight test, the backlight source will form a huge light ratio with the surroundings, which will affect the dynamic range, color depth and other performance of the visual camera photosensitive element, causing the visual system to lose its function when facing sudden backlight, and even the car camera will be damaged. The sensors were "blinded", and models based on vision + millimeter-wave radar solutions were seriously interfered by environmental factors and failed the test.

However,In the nighttime snow ACC test and backlight test, models equipped with lidar showed significant advantages.。

becauseLidar has the characteristic of actively emitting light, unlike the human eye/camera that requires external light or reflection from objects, it is almost immune to interference caused by changes in surrounding light.Maintain “accurate insight” even in the dark night”. By actively emitting a laser beam and accurately measuring the time it takes for the beam to reflect back from surrounding objects, the distance and position of the object can be determined.Obtaining three-dimensional information of the surrounding environment provides vehicles with more comprehensive and accurate perception data.

This enables lidar to identify static fake cars on the road earlier and rely on adaptive cruise control (ACC) for smooth braking.

This highlights the advantages of lidar in complex environments and the limitations of the vision + millimeter wave radar solution in dealing with uncertain factors.

In the daytime road obstacle test, the performance difference between pure visual vision + millimeter wave radar models and models with lidar is obvious. When the vehicle was traveling at a speed of 60km/h, the pure vision + millimeter wave radar model directly hit the construction sign and the water horse because it could not identify the obstacles in time. There are two fundamental reasons for this accident:

1. The core of visual perception technology is to analyze high-density information through complex software algorithms, identify objects and estimate their distance. However, in the face of "unknown" objects such as special-shaped obstacles that may appear on the road, the system may make wrong judgments because it cannot fully and accurately perceive them.

   
   

2. The imaging capability of millimeter wave radar is relatively weak, and the detection effect of objects with low reflectivity is not ideal. Millimeter wave radar only outputs about 1,000 points per frame, and its ability to identify the shape and contour of objects is also limited.

Looking back at the test results of the lidar model, the lidar model detected the obstacle ahead early and triggered the emergency avoidance function.

So why is there such a disparity?

becauseLiDAR emits millions of laser points every second to capture the three-dimensional positioning information of surrounding objects, and then clearly presents the details of pedestrians, zebra crossings, vehicles, trees and other objects with high resolution., and the density of laser points directly determines the resolution. The denser the laser points, the more complete and clear the real scene can be reconstructed, achieving "image-level" point cloud picture presentation.

This result fully demonstrates that lidar’s ability to identify and judge irregular objects is significantly better than the vision + millimeter wave radar solution.

The purpose of testing is not only to verify, but also to ensure that excellent performance and ideal results can be achieved in actual applications. With the hot sales of lidar models, many models with lidar are already driving on daily roads, and more and more users are also posting "lidar rescue" videos of their cars on short video platforms.

In real driving scenarios, we often encounter various road conditions such as "ghost probes", "retrograde pedestrians in the dark", "faulty vehicles occupying the road" and "road debris". In these scenarios, lidar can greatly play its role. Advantages: With a detection capability of over 250m, active detection that is not afraid of light and high resolution, it can predict dangers ahead, providing more reaction time and a more sufficient safety redundancy distance for intelligent driving.

Many netizens were filled with emotion after seeing such "rescue" videos, and also expressed their views on lidar and smart driving:

In its early years, consumers were skeptical of lidar, believing it was of limited use in practical applications. However, with the advancement of technology and the increase in practical application cases, people's views on lidar have gradually changed, and they have more and more intuitive feelings and even personal experiences of the value and necessity of lidar.

However, there are still many consumers who are still hesitant about the price of lidar models. Early lidar models were priced between RMB 30,000 and RMB 50,000 more than regular models, causing car companies to say they “cannot afford to use them” and consumers to feel “too much to bear”.

However, Leishen Intelligent has been committed to solving the problems of "high cost, difficult mass production, and unstable performance" of lidar since 2015. It insists on independent innovation, continuously increases investment in research and development, and establishes a complete integrated management system of research, production and sales. , build an automated factory of 30,000 square meters, comprehensively upgrade all aspects of design, R&D, process, manufacturing, and testing capabilities from key core components to the entire machine chain, continuously optimize product performance while reducing lidar product production costs to new lows. Help customers reduce costs and increase efficiency.

In the future, with the continuous advancement of technology and the increasingly mature market, Leishen Intelligence will continue to lead the development of lidar technology and contribute to the bright future of intelligent transportation and intelligent driving.