User:MaryGaulke/sandbox/Velodyne LiDAR

Velodyne LiDAR is a Silicon Valley-based LiDAR technology company spun off from Velodyne Acoustics. As of August 2016, the company worked with 25 self-driving car programs.

History
David Hall founded Velodyne in 1983 as an audio company specializing in subwoofer technology.

Velodyne's experience with laser distance measurement started in 2005, when David Hall and his brother Bruce (then president of Velodyne) entered a vehicle in a driverless car race sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The experience led them to realize shortcomings in existing LiDAR technology, which only scanned a single, fixed line of sight. Velodyne developed new sensors for the 2007 race. The brothers sold their non-visual detection system as a steering input to five of the six teams that finished the race. The system used a spinning ball that shot out 64 lasers and used the length of time it took the light to bounce back to create an image of the road ahead. The new system produced one million data points per second, while earlier systems produced 5,000 data points per second.



Velodyne donated one of its early prototype sensors to the Robotics Collection at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in 2011. In 2015, Frost & Sullivan gave Velodyne's VLP-16 sensor the North American Automotive ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) Sensors Product Leadership Award.

In 2016, Velodyne's LiDAR department was spun off from Velodyne Acoustics as Velodyne LiDAR, Inc. On August 16, 2016, Velodyne announced a $150M investment from Ford and Baidu. Five months later, the company announced plans to expand a megafactory in San Jose, California, in order to ramp up to 1 million units annually by 2018. Velodyne is also building a new R&D facility in Alameda, California.

Technology


Velodyne LiDAR focuses on applications of LiDAR technology for use in autonomous vehicles, vehicle safety systems, 3D mobile mapping, 3D aerial mapping and security. Both Velodyne's more advanced sensors (those with 64 lasers) and its more affordable ones (with 16 lasers) have a range of around 120 meters, a longer range than those of cameras. When in use on a moving vehicle, a Velodyne sensor can create an intricate image of the road ahead, including details like street signs and foliage.

In December 2016, Velodyne announced significant progress in the development of solid-state LiDAR sensors, enabling the company to produce sensors more compact than their traditional predecessors at reduced cost—under $50 per part when mass manufactured and sold in high volumes. IEEE Spectrum compared the development to "marking down a Caddy to Matchbox car prices." Solid-state sensors are also at reduced risk for malfunction, since they contain fewer moving parts.

In April 2017, Velodyne announced Velarray, a sensor that uses a fixed set of lasers and receivers, rather than the spinning array in previous sensors. The Velarray sensor is also smaller than its predecessors, and does not create a 360-degree image of its surroundings, as Velodyne's other sensors do. Instead, it maps a 120-degree arc, with the intention that a car will be equipped with multiple Velarray sensors—one at the front and one at the rear, or one at each of its corners. Velodyne plans for each Velarray unit to cost in the hundreds of dollars.

Major customers and partners
In 2010, Google (now Alphabet) began testing self-driving cars on the streets in the San Francisco Bay Area using Velodyne’s LiDAR technology. Alphabet's first self-driving car prototype (built on Toyota's Prius model) used Velodyne's HDL-64E LiDAR sensor, costing $75,000. As of 2016, the cost of the Velodyne sensors Alphabet used had fallen to $8,000. (Since then, Alphabet has stopped using Velodyne sensors in its vehicles.)

In 2012, Velodyne LiDAR signed a contract with Caterpillar for a supply of LiDAR sensors to be used for off-road vehicles. These sensors help Caterpillar map quarries, farms and work sites during construction.

In 2012 through 2015, Velodyne's spinning HDL-32E sensors have been seen on mobile mapping vehicles by Nokia Here, Microsoft Bing Maps, Tencent, Baidu, and TomTom. Leading mapping providers like Topcon and Leica Geosystems also use Velodyne's scanners for their turnkey mobile solutions.

In 2016, Ford Motor Company announced that it will expand its fleet of self-driving R&D vehicles and use Velodyne LiDAR's next-generation solid-state hybrid LiDAR pucks with no moving parts at a cost of around $8,000.