Editing by Greg Gao/WM Zhang
With more manufacturers going into the autonomous driving market, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), a core laser sensor technology behind it, is becoming the new battlefield. Chinese players like Xiaomi, DJI, Huawei, and Baidu are racing to work on it for powerful features and lower prices through various approaches.
LiDAR technology is an integral part of the autonomous driving revolution, employing micro-optics to detect the nature and proximity of surrounding objects. It uses pulsed laser light to measure the distance between two vehicles by illuminating the desired target and measuring the reflected pulses using a sensor. Automotive systems utilize LiDAR to control vehicle speed and braking systems automatically.
Leading players in the autonomous driving field, such as Google Waymo, Mobileye, and Cruise, all use LiDAR as their core hardware. In 2021, major global car companies plan or launch new models with LiDAR to diversify their technical routes further.
Bringing down its price is a challenging task. Industry experts expect it to drop to $500 and $300 per piece by 2025 and 2030. Chinese company Huawei vowed to bring it down to $200. This technology's global automotive applications market is estimated to reach as large as $26 billion. More manufacturers will launch products with LiDAR.
Chinese mobile phone and consumer electronics giant Xiaomi announced last month to go into autonomous driving. The move did not surprise insiders familiar with Xiaomi's strong capabilities in supply chain integration. The company is said to have been developing access to LiDAR technology through a few investment channels.
Through Xiaomi Yangtze River Industrial Fund(小米长江产业基金), the company invested in Adaps Photonics(灵明光子), a company specializing in photoelectric sensor chips for laser radar used in smart hardware to achieve 3D sensing. There are also media reports that Roborock(石头科技), a company invested by Xiaomi, is developing multi-line LiDAR for use in its intelligent automatic robot vacuum cleaners and may be used in autonomous vehicles in the future.
Shunwei Capital(顺为资本), a venture capital fund founded by Xiaomi founders Lei Jun and Tuck Lye Koh in 2011, also invested in Benewake(北醒光子) earlier, a provider of solid-state LiDAR sensors & solutions and Idriverplus(智行者), a driverless vehicle and robotics systems maker.
Benewake's LiDAR products have started mass production. They are widely used in autonomous vehicles for collision avoidance, drones for logistics and farming plant protection, intelligent traffic systems, smart home robots, automatic guided vehicles for logistics and warehouse management. Idriverplus also has several products in use in the marketplace.
Chinese drone giant DJI, which launched its intelligent driving brand "DJI Automotive" in mid-April, has invested before in Livox Technology, a LiDAR technology provider, through an incubation program.
According to Deng Ruihao, Global Commercial Director of Livox, Livox has given up more expensive mechanical LiDAR type adopted by most earlier players and focuses on a new type with non-repetitive scanning technology.
Livox launched two of these new types of products with much lower prices at RMB6,499($999.8 ) RMB9,000($1,384.6) respectively, a new price mark. At the 2021 Shanghai Auto Show in late April, Xpeng, a leading Chinese electric car company, unveiled a compact sedan Xpeng P5, equipped with the latest Livox LiDAR products.
Huawei is emerging as a major LiDAR player. As early as 2019, Huawei was reported to be developing LiDAR and millimeter-wave radar, mainly using its own 5G technology to deliver all-weather imaging. In December 2020, Huawei released automotive-grade high-performance LiDAR products and solutions. The new high-end electric passenger brand ARCFOX from Chinese car manufacturer BAIC adopted Huawei's LiDAR products.
Huawei runs an optoelectronic technology research center in Wuhan City in central China with a total of more than 10,000 staff. According to Wang Jun, President of Huawei Smart Car Solutions Business Unit, Huawei has a goal to reduce the cost of LiDAR to $200, or even $100, with powerful functions.
Baidu, China's top search and autonomous driving company, has been considered a long-time LiDAR player because it is one of the largest investors in Velodyne, the trailblazer of the LiDAR industry in the world. It now has adopted a newly upgraded purely visual solution for its latest intelligent driving platform, Apollo Navigation Pilot(ANP) unveiled at this year's Shanghai Auto Show. Compared with LiDAR solutions, ANP has advantages in lower cost, ease for mass-production, and self-learning capabilities.
Wang Yunpeng, Baidu's general manager of the intelligence driving department, said that though his company will continue working on it for a bigger scale market.