Russian internet company Yandex has started developing lidars for its self-driving cars. It concerns two different types and the development of a camera to be able to properly process the use of LED lights in traffic in particular.
Yandex says a lidar is a critical component to its self-driving car platform, and engineers in Moscow have started testing proprietary lidars. There are two types: a solid-state lidar with a 120-degree field of view, which Yandex says can provide a very detailed view of objects in front of the car, and a more traditional, rotating lidar with a 360-degree field of view. The company also expects to integrate the sensors on its autonomous delivery robots presented in November.
Yandex reports that it has developed software to adjust the lidars’ scanning patterns as you drive, responding to a variety of driving conditions, such as highways, busy cities and different weather types. According to the internet company, this allows its lidar to focus on a specific object and adjust its scan pattern to determine whether an object, say, two hundred meters away is a bicycle, pedestrian or something else.
Dmitry Polishchuk, the head of Yandex’s self-driving car division, says this capability differs from third-party lidars because he says they immediately analyze and filter the data after it is collected. Polishchuk states that the lidars from Yandex receive more information about the environment, because they can access the raw data. He says that with its own lidars and software, Yandex is able to analyze the raw data and synchronize it with information from other sensors so that the car can better identify objects. In addition, Polishchuk says current prototypes are half as cheap as existing lidars and that cost reduction could eventually reach 75 percent in mass production.
Yandex says it is also developing its own camera for self-driving cars. It can quickly adapt to changing light conditions and process the LEDs of, for example, traffic lights without flickering. The latter, according to the company, is a problem that often occurs when cameras see LEDs.
The Russian company says that its autonomously driving cars have covered some 2.4 million kilometers in the past three years, and that the necessary knowledge has been gained about what kind of data is needed from the sensors. Like many other companies, Yandex uses a combination of cameras, radars and lidars for its self-driving cars.
The 360-degree lidar is on top and two solid state lids are incorporated into the white housing.