Innovusion, experts in design and development of image-grade lidar technology, showed off their products for autonomous driving at CES this year. Their long-range Falcon lidar was honored with a CES Innovation Award.
At CES, Innovusion exhibited a bird’s eye live view of intersections of booth walkways. Visitors could also experience an immersive and interactive VR journey of Las Vegas landmarks on the Strip. Innovusion’s long-range Falcon lidar and short-to-midrange Robin lidar covered the surrounding view of a vehicle to support safety, comfort, and efficiency in many autonomous driving scenarios—highway; city, and automated parking.
The Falcon lidar’s novel architecture with integrated optics and scanning elements provides a 3D real-time point cloud image with simultaneous long-range and high-resolution picture. It can detect objects at up to 500 metres away, and even dark objects with just 10-per-cent reflectivity at up to 250 metres with 90-per-cent POD (probability of detection).
It is the first product of its kind being mass-produced for consumer vehicles, and has been integrated as part of the standard sensor system in the Nio ET5; ET7, and ES7/EL7) in 2022, lowering barriers to entry to high-performance autonomous driving for the broad consumer base.
The Robin, on the other hand, is a short-to-midrange lidar built on the latest electronic and photonic technologies. It produces a 3D point cloud image of its surroundings with a 905-nanometre laser. It is modular, and can be highly customized to meet the varying requirements of different customers. Its optical window and body frame can fit a variety of vehicle exterior designs. Its ultra-compact size allows Robin to be integrated onto side fenders, headlamps; rear lights, and bumpers. The Robin can detect a 10-per-cent reflective object up to 180 metres away, with 90% POD under 100k Lx illumination. It has a field of view of up to 140°H and 90°V, with resolution of 0.2° × 0.2°. It caters for highway lane changing; traffic merging; unprotected intersection turning; roundabout driving, and urban cruising.
By the end of 2022, Innovusion had delivered more than 50,000 Falcon lidar units for production vehicles—the highest delivery volume of any lidar manufacturer in the world. This year, the company will achieve a production capacity over 300,000 per year and can easily be expanded within months to support future demands from global automakers.
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Innovusion has partnered with Nio for Falcon lidars integrated in Nio’s ET7 electric sedan. Nio has built up a full-stack autonomous driving system including perception algorithm, localization, control strategy and platform software. It features 33 high-performance sensing units, including 11 8-megapixel high-resolution cameras, 1 Falcon lidar, 5 millimetre-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors, and two high-precision positioning units.
