This lidar/camera hybrid could be a powerful addition to driverless cars

Enlarge / Ouster's OS-1 (left) and OS-2 lidar sensors. (credit: Ouster)

Lidars and cameras are two of the three standard sensors (along with radar) on almost all self-driving cars being tested today. Lidars and cameras both operate by detecting reflected light, but cameras are passive, whereas lidars actively send out laser pulses and measure the light that gets reflected back. Cameras produce a flat two-dimensional image, while conventional lidars produce a three-dimensional "point cloud."

Lidar startup Ouster has developed a clever and potentially significant hack: the company figured out how to make the sensors already on its powerful OS-1 lidar units function as a camera, producing a panoramic two-dimensional snapshot of the sensor's surroundings.

"The OS-1's optical system has a larger aperture than most DSLRs, and the photon counting ASIC we developed has extreme low-light sensitivity," Ouster CEO Angus Pacala writes. "So we're able to collect ambient imagery even in low-light conditions."

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