Last Updated on 06/05/2021 by Khushi
(image courtesy: gadgets360)
The former Apple engineers creation, Aeva Technologies, a self-driving sensor company announced on Thursday that its sensor can detect other vehicles from a distance of more than 500 metres and pedestrians from a distance of more than 350 metres.
Aeva creates a LiDAR sensor that helps cars get a three-dimensional map of the road and can detect the motion of distant objects, allowing them to tell the difference between stationary objects like trees and moving objects like pedestrians or cyclists. Aeva has agreements with automotive suppliers Denso and ZF Friedrichshafen AG for mass production.
Longer detection ranges give self-driving vehicles more time to make decisions, particularly at higher speeds, so LiDAR sensor detection range is an important metric for automakers. Other companies, such as Aeye, a German automotive supplier that bought a stake in the company last year, claim to be able to detect other vehicles from 300 metres away.
LiDARs create images by shooting laser beams and tracking the reflections of those beams as they bounce off their surroundings. It’s difficult to detect dark objects that don’t emit any light.
Aeva claims that thanks to a proprietary chip it created, its sensors can detect objects with less than 10% reflectivity at long distances.
