The future of lidar is uncertain unless, as Voyant hopes, its price and size are reduced to fractions of their current values. As long as lidars are sandwich-sized devices that cost thousands, they won’t be ubiquitous – so Voyant has raised some money to bring its smaller, cheaper, easier to make, yet high performing lidar to production.
When I wrote the company’s seed round in 2019, the goal was more or less to shrink lidar from sandwich size to fingernail size using silicon photonics. But the real challenge almost every lidar company faces is bringing the price down. Between a powerful laser, a powerful receptor, and some mechanical or optical means of directing the beam, it just isn’t easy to make something cheap enough that you can easily fit several of them into a less expensive vehicle like an LED or touchscreen than $ 30,000.
CEO Peter Stern just joined the company at the beginning of COVID looking for a way to turn a promising prototype developed by co-founders Chris Phare and Steven Miller into a working and marketable product. After going back to basics, they ended up with a photonics-based frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) system (do it first) that could be manufactured in existing commercial factories.
“Every other system is filled with a lot of expensive stuff – our vision is to have a chip that can be mass produced, like everything else,” he said, noting that the lack of a powerful precision laser is a huge cost and space saving. “What people use as a laser source generally costs a lot, has to be assembled and calibrated, there are lens problems … our laser sources are basically out of date, slightly outdated Datacom lasers the size of sesame seeds. These things cost about US $ 5 each, the laser path costs US $ 30, something like that. “
This tiny scale is made possible by the FMCW method, which is more commonly used in radar. A continuous beam of light encoded with identifiable data patterns and constantly adjusting its frequency, this approach avoids many of the problems with conventional lidar methods. And the way Voyant does it, it’s cheap – it’s possible to get under a hundred dollars with Scale. The entire optics, beam treatment and sensors, etc. are located directly on the chip.
Close up of some of the waveguides found on the lidar chip.
But they don’t compete against Velodyne or any of the emerging lidar companies that are making their way in the automotive sector like Luminar and Baraja. “We’re too underfunded to take us through an automotive development cycle,” Stern said – and it’s actually a pretty expensive market that it’s trying to break into. “Because we are cheaper, we see applications in robotics, mobility, occupational safety … wherever someone wants to use a Velodyne puck, we can replace it for non-automotive purposes pretty quickly.”
You might think, “Wait, I have lidar on my phone – what’s different about it?” Sure, you can make LIDAR units on this scale and size, but their capabilities are extremely limited. Ideal for scanning your living room, but unreliable beyond a few meters or in sunshine or bad weather. Voyant doesn’t rely on cars, but their devices still have auto-grade specifications: accurate to the millimeter to a hundred meters, exactly what you want when you’re traveling at 70 MPH.
The FMCW technique (also used in Aevas lidars) creates fewer dots, resulting in lower resolution, but offers instant Doppler speed. Knowing how fast the thing your beam hits is moving without having to expend additional scanning power or computation is arguably a huge plus.
Another interesting advantage over the competition is the device’s ability to detect not only distance and speed, but also material, at least to some extent. A measure of polarization is used, a factor of the beam that is influenced in different ways by different surfaces. From a single data point, the devices from Voyant should be able to recognize, among other things, whether it is metal, asphalt, wood, skin, clothing or fur. This is incredibly useful for categorizing objects – if it has fur, it’s probably not a tree or a car, is it?
Block diagram of Lark’s LIDAR test kit.
The $ 15.4 million A round was led by UP.Partners with the participation of LDV Capital and Contour Ventures. The company plans to use the money to go into production by putting its development kits in the hands of partners. The “Lark” is the more traditional of the two and reflects the laser signal from a galvo mirror, while the “Sparrow” unit uses 2D beam steering technology, which further reduces the need for mechanical components.
Stern said they will manufacture around 200 units for partners in 2022 and then start taking commercial orders from 2023 onwards in an industrial market beyond the reach of companies making larger, more expensive units.
