Lidar “Think Tank” DVN Committed to Success of Lidar Community

About 25 participants from various parts of the automotive lidar world participated in a first meeting at the Dorint Hotel near Frankfurt, Germany. The list included Peter Zegelaar (Ford); Elias Marel (Volvo); Gregory Poillion (Blickfeld); Yang Ji/Rocardo Ferreira (Liangdao); Motohiro Komatsu (Koito); Guillaume Point (Stellantis); Achim Freiding (Hyundai); Ove Salomonsson and Hod Finkelstein (Aeye); Matthew Everett and Thomas Sommer (Lumentum); Jennifer Ruskowski (Fraunhofer IMS); Jordi Castells (Nio); Clément Nouvel (Valeo); Unsal Kabuk (Huawei); Mario Brumm (Ibeo); Henri Haefner (Cepton); Dieter Gabriel (Velodyne); Clemens Hofmann (AMS Osram), and Christian Passlick (Auer).

After an introduction by Hector Fratty, a recap of DVN’s lidar activities and ambitions for the new lidar community were presented by Leo Metzemaekers, Ralf Schaefer and Alain Servel. Three working groups discussed these topics and gave following results to

WG1: Benefits and needs of a Cooperative Lidar community

What does lidar bring for the car?

• Education: why are there so many systems? What are their benefits, drawbacks, and particulars?
• Benefits: what benefits does the lidar bring to the car? What are the use cases where radar and camera fail, what are the lidar requirements, what are the limitations?
• Regulation: use case without regulation does not make sense, need to shape it. What is the difference to the lighting community: lidar is new; what else?
• Many lidar companies exist with different level of “technological layer”: Whom to work with
  • Companies can find partners to offer higher part of technology layer
• How to compare performance claims of different lidar systems / technologies.
• Align the chain of specifications, different languages within value chain—need translations.
• Automakers: Is there a bike next to the car? When to bring software into the community?
• Tier 1: Mechanical mirror or MEMS?
• Tier 2: how many pixels should my SPAD have, what power should my EEL have…?

WG2: Standardization, use cases and testing:

What will be the most frequent use cases with need for lidar in the next 3-5 years? Are there local/regional/global differences?

• Mobility needs
  • What are the applications that will define H volumes of Lidars?
  • Conditions are favourable. L³–L⁴ requirements determine where to invest
  • Next Regulations on AD will help
  • Needs in term of safety (see NCAP requirements)
  • City Traffic: Complex scenarios, obstacles can hide relevant targets; coöperative sensing (ITS)
  • Tesla crashes and lidar rejection could inspire action

• Which initiatives/actions are necessary to establish a standard for definition and testing of use cases?
• No Common inputs currently. Necessity to have a common KPI?
• Use cases have to be standardised
• What type of data (point cloud or objects) ?
• Automakers in China wants more details in data output
• What is the role of lidar in the context of sensors fusion?
• Automakers need to be helped; how could such initiatives be supported by the DVN Lidar Community?
• For Which use case are there limitations (radars; cameras, lidars)
• Promote lidar technology towards end-users

WG3: Promotion of safety and convenience benefits of lidar enabled functions

• Promotion to safety organisations, example NCAP, IIHS or similar
  • Define real world testing conditions
  • What are real world KPIs?
  • Make targets more realistic
  • Give inputs about use cases (example: ACC scenario with sudden entrance of motorbike)

• Promotion to public media
  • Common booth on motor shows like IAA
  • Public professional awareness through conferences
  • Invite influencers (ex: ADAC) to experience the benefits of lidar

• End user approach
  • Address younger people as early adopters
  • Address company cars as safety and convenience segment
  • Education to end user about Lidar to create trust in ADAS/AD
  • Convenience by visualizing (ADAS/AD) vehicle action to driver through Lidar enabled HMI

• Styling appearance
  • How Lidar can be positioned as styling element?
  • “I own technology!” as an adoption driver (China)

• Miscellaneous
  • Learn from DRL (lighting) adoption and project experience on potential lidar adoption case
  • Which elements (technical, financial, safety, society) drive lidar adoption for automotive

General Conclusions of the plenary discussion

To conclude this first seminar on this DVN lidar community and its possible roadmap, participants made the following suggestions:

• This lidar community might take in account needs from end-consumers and promote lidar towards end-consumers through associated members like automobile clubs (ADAC, AAA, CAA…).
• It might be a platform to create or enhance synergies between lidar actors and to share information.
• A good start is made with our community, already some level of trust and willingness to share has been created, the next challenge will be to put more meat on the bone. Four live events per year could be good as a start.
• The topic of styling differentiation for lidar has been addressed, in addition it is also worthwhile to investigate other differentiators made possible with lidar such as safe parking under any condition and other features.
• The topic of use cases could get more attention, also with stronger involvement of automakers.