Techstination, your destination for gadgets and gear.   I’m Fred Fishkin.        Velodyne is a company best known for its acoustical equipment over the years.    But these days it has also been busy helping autonomous vehicles to see their surroundings with LiDAR technology.   That is similar to radar…but with lasers.    Velodyne’s Director of Automotive sales and marketing,  John Eggert,  says LiDAR is often used along with cameras…

“To validate that the camera is seeing what it thinks it is seeing, to validate that the radar is seeing what it’s seeing.  That’s how accurate LiDAR is, considered kind of the golden sensor.   And the challenge until now has been is LiDAR too expensive, is it just an R&D tool?   And what Velodyne is doing and probably others are doing is trying to get this to automotive grade sensing at a very affordable price for automakers.”

In the hundreds…rather than thousands of dollars.

You can find us at Techstination.com.   I’m Fred Fishkin.