Luminar Technologies, Inc. has been making a lot of progress that it believes will help cement its status as one of the leading players in the autonomous vehicle technology space with its automotive lidar hardware and software technology. The company will provide its quarterly business update and report its financials for the first quarter tomorrow, May 13th, hosted by Founder and CEO Austin Russell and CFO Tom Fennimore.
The company’s late 2020 business combination with Gores Metropoulos, Inc., a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by affiliates of The Gores Group, LLC, and Metropoulos and Co., and listing on the Nasdaq was the culmination of several landmark achievements in 2020. Those included the introduction of its Iris lidar and software products for series production across three industry verticals: consumer vehicles, trucking, and robotaxis.
Earlier in 2020, Luminar signed what it said was the industry’s first production deal for autonomous consumer vehicles with Volvo Cars, while also recently striking deals with Daimler Truck AG and Intel’s Mobileye. Its latest Iris lidar technology is being designed into vehicle models planned to commence series production starting in 2022, initially on Volvo Cars’ SPA 2 consumer vehicle platform.
“Over the past few years, we’ve made the transition from a technology development startup to now a global provider of autonomous systems to many of the world’s largest OEMs and commercial trucking players to power their autonomous future in production,” said Russell in December.
Honing its lidar
Founded in 2012, the company shipped its first lidar called Hydra in April 2018. Since then, the company—from bases in Palo Alto, Orlando, Colorado Springs, Detroit, and Munich—has become known for its industry-leading 3D data, with camera-like high resolution and radar-like long range that allows for reliable detection of object types out to 250 m (820 ft).
It entered the B Sample phase for its next-generation Iris technology in October 2020. The first Iris units began shipping to Volvo from Luminar’s advanced manufacturing facility in Orlando, FL. That milestone marked the completion of engineering validation of its Iris sensor in preparation for auto-grade deployment in series production.
“It’s an exciting moment for us to be shipping the first units and is proving out that our industry-leading technology can be brought to the consumer vehicle platforms to enable next-generation autonomy,” said Jason Wojack, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Luminar, at the time.
In a March 2021 update, Wojack gave a video update on progress.
“From Hydra to Iris, we’ve made improvements in all aspects,” he said. “On all fronts, Iris is a stepwise improvement on the core technology that we’ve developed. At Volvo, our Iris sensor has been integrated into the vehicle, their program with the integration of Iris is on schedule.”
“We’ve gone from concept of an amazing product to actually building our first A samples and B samples, shipping them to our customers, and getting amazing feedback,” added Lonnie Bernardoni, VP Supply Chain and Manufacturing at Luminar Technologies, on the progress made with Iris in 18 months.
The company’s latest perception technology enables both detection and classification of objects out to 250 m. The technology understands dark objects with minimal reflectivity, like a black car or a tire on the road, even at night. It can perceive semantic segmentation classes like drivable space, lane, object, obstacle; object classes such as vehicles, trucks, pedestrians, and motorcycles; and can understand lane lines (whether solid, dashed, and dotted) and roads out to 150 m (490 ft).
A single 1550-nm laser enables long ranges with pulse energy of 905 nm. Rather than spinning the whole lidar device, there are two-axis scanning mirrors with 120° x 30° FOV. The receiver is said to feature the most sensitive, highest dynamic range InGaAs detector in the world when paired with the company’s receiver ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit). The processing electronics use an in-house, custom, mixed-signal ASIC with better performance for significantly less cost than complex ADC (analog-to-digital converter) chips.
First full-stack autonomous system for production with Zenseact
In March, Luminar announced one of its most significant partnerships with Zenseact, the new 550-person team formed by Volvo Cars of its top experts to deliver ADAS (advanced driver assistance system) and autonomous software for series production vehicles. Volvo Cars representing both Luminar’s and Zenseact’s first production design win for software.
While the wider autonomous industry is largely focused on robotaxi applications, the Luminar and Zenseact collaboration is focused on delivering systems for series production vehicles. Zenseact is responsible for delivering its OnePilot software and Luminar’s perception software to Volvo Cars, while Luminar is responsible for providing the holistic Sentinel solution to other automakers.
“The whole point of autonomous driving technology is to reduce accidents and save lives,” said Ödgärd Andersson, CEO of Zenseact. “This alliance enables us together to make that technology more broadly accessible and thus even more impactful.”
“We are working together day in and out to deliver this comprehensive autonomous software solution for Volvo Cars, and now are making this solution available to the industry at large,” added Russell. “For Luminar, this is key in our transformation from a lidar provider to a software and systems company, enabling autonomy and improved vehicle safety to become ubiquitous.”
Luminar says that its new product suite, Sentinel, is the first full-stack autonomous solution for series production in the industry. The solution integrates Zenseact’s OnePilot autonomous driving software solution alongside Luminar’s Iris lidar, perception software, and other components as a foundation. It enables automakers to offer Highway Autonomy and Proactive Safety capabilities on their production vehicles.
As Luminar explains it, Highway Autonomy is a hands-free, eyes-free true autonomous driving system for highways—as opposed to the most advanced ADAS systems today, which require constant driver attention and system overrides at a moment’s notice, defeating the main purpose of autonomy.
With Proactive Safety, it says that, for the first time, vehicles can proactively avoid collisions with evasive maneuvers, reducing accident rates by up to seven times. The most advanced camera-based ADAS systems today will attempt to reactively avoid collisions only in ideal conditions, in a straight line, and generally after the driver does not respond.
Zenseact’s OnePilot software helps provide a single user experience throughout a user’s journey. OnePilot continuously assesses the surroundings to enable autonomous highway driving, and it provides the driver with useful information and warnings and may intervene by overriding controls to make sure the user has a safe journey.
China production entry with SAIC Motor’s R brand EV line
In March, Luminar announced a strategic partnership with SAIC Motor Corp. Ltd., the largest automaker in China. The lidar supplier will help power the autonomous capabilities and advanced safety features in SAIC’s new R brand production vehicles with its lidar hardware as well as components of its Sentinel software system.
As part of the collaboration, Luminar will be establishing an office in Shanghai alongside SAIC Motor. With the R brand series starting in 2022, the partnership is expected to deliver the first autonomous production vehicles in China, establishing SAIC’s technology leadership position and Luminar’s production launch in the region.
Luminar’s Iris lidar will be “seamlessly integrated” into the roofline of the R brand vehicles at the optimal vantage point. Its Sentinel software components, including object detection, classification, and tracking, will help to enable planned Highway Autonomy and Proactive Safety capabilities on the vehicles.
“Our new R brand line of vehicles will combine the best technology with luxury and comfort, and autonomous capabilities are central to that vision,” said Yang Xiaodong, Vice President of SAIC Motor Corp. Ltd. “The only autonomous vehicle company we seriously considered was Luminar; they are in a league of their own in lidar technology and software, uniquely enabling us to achieve our vision in series production.”
“SAIC has grown to establish itself as the largest automaker in the world’s largest automotive market, and has no intention of slowing down when it comes to electric and autonomous vehicles,” said Russell. “Instead, they are clearly leading the charge to set a new technology standard for both China and the industry at large.”
Luminar and SAIC Motor engineers will work closely to integrate hardware and software technology into the vehicles and will also incorporate over-the-air updates to expand the operating domain of autonomy and further improve the safety of vehicles over time.
Contributing to Pony.ai’s new robotaxi platform
Luminar’s latest announcement is a developmental collaboration with Pony.ai on its new robotaxi platform set to deploy automotive-grade production autonomous fleets in 2023 globally.
Toward that aim, Pony.ai recently announced that it has already driven more than 5 million km (3.1 million mi) across an operational coverage area of over 850 km² (328 mi²) and has provided more than 220,000 Robotaxi rides. Its next-generation fleet will integrate Luminar’s Iris system featuring a multi-sensor 360-degree configuration and a slim profile of just 10 cm (3.9 in) on top of the vehicle’s roof.
“Today, we’re finally seeing the line blur between what we’ve known as beautiful consumer car design and the look of a Robotaxi,” said Luminar’s Wojack. “This is a true moment in the evolution of vehicle design and innovation.”
The goal of the partnership is to increase safe, autonomous driving in complex urban environments with an integrated sensor design that leads advanced development to production scale.
“Partnering with Luminar is a critical enabling milestone for Pony.ai as we build our next-generation system and prepare for large-scale series production,” said James Peng, CEO and Founder of Pony.ai.
The partnership followed Pony.ai’s expansion of its robotaxi service across five cities—Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing in China, and Irvine and Fremont in California. Pony.ai says it began testing China’s first robotaxi service, PonyPilot, in late 2018 in Guangzhou, and in 2019 became the first company to roll out a public-facing robotaxi service in California. It also says it is the only self-driving company with large-scale deployment across five cities internationally and a fleet of over 200 autonomous vehicles.
“Pony.ai’s vision to create a dynamic, vehicle-agnostic autonomous driving system is very impressive,” said Luminar’s Russell. “We’re leveraging the full extent of the technology and product development work we’ve accomplished over the years, and directly re-applying it to Pony.ai’s platform and fleet. This partnership marks a significant milestone towards the realization of safe autonomous robotaxi services in the years to come.”
