Imagine having self-driving cars on Nigerian roads! No more traffic jams caused by  recalcitrant and impatient drivers, reduction in man hours wasted on the roads with its attendant effects on health and economy. and less accidents! Lagos residents spend more man hours in traffic than they do on their jobs; so driverless or self-driving vehicles will be a very welcome development. Realising that so many lives are lost each year in vehicle accidents, Austin Russell, an accomplished Applied Physicist, sought to solve the problem and in 2012, he founded Florida, US-based Luminar Technologies Inc. His vision was to develop a new type of LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system for the autonomous vehicle industry. Now, they are out with a new type of LiDAR system to improve self-driving cars. Excerpts:

By Ebele Orakpowith Agency report

WHEN real people’s lives are at stake, driving safely 99% of the time isn’t good enough. We’re here to solve that last 1%,” said Austin Russel, Founder/CEO of  Luminar Technologies Inc. He said the “new kind of LiDAR system will make autonomous vehicles safer and the production more scalable.”

LiDAR is a surveying method that measures distance to a target by illuminating that target with a pulsed laser light, and measuring the reflected pulses with a sensor.

Advantages

A statement from the company’s website noted that the new Luminar Technologies system has the ability to see at 50 times greater resolution and 10 times longer range than current systems.

“For example, at 200 meters, Luminar can detect hard-to-see, low-reflectivity objects like a black car or tire on the road and offer a full seven seconds of reaction time at 75 miles per hour. Today’s best performing LiDAR systems see such objects at less than 35 meters, which at highway speeds offer less than one second of reaction time.”

In the past five years, the company has been raising funds, engineering and manufacturing all the major components of the new system, including funding and creating the chips, lasers, receivers, scanners and processing electronics.

“Photonics is instrumental in making self-driving cars safe and ubiquitous,” said Jason Eichenholz, Russell’s mentor, who he took on board in 2014 to bring the technology to production.

He added: “Of all the technical challenges I’ve faced in my career, building Luminar’s LiDAR system has been the most challenging and rewarding.”

The duo said that theirs would be the first LiDAR to achieve the necessary range and resolution to drive autonomous vehicles safely and at full speed, meeting the needs of every major autonomous vehicle program.

The LiDAR sensor sets new standards in performance, scalability and autonomous vehicle safety, said Russell in a statement. “We had to find 2,000 ways not to make a LiDAR system, before we made a breakthrough and found the one way that finally delivers on what the industry needs.”

The new system is 40 times more powerful than old systems while staying eye-safe because Luminar operates at the 1,500 nm wavelength. The receiver was built using an InGaAs design, which was traditionally considered too costly to pursue for mass-market LiDAR production. However, Luminar has been able to reduce the cost of its InGaAs-based receiver.

Benefits: Reduction in traffic collisions, resulting injuries and related costs, including a lower need for insurance; increase in traffic flow; enhanced mobility for children, the elderly, disabled and poor people; the relief of travellers from driving and navigation chores; lower fuel consumption; significantly reduced needs for parking space in cities; a reduction in crime; and the facilitation of different business models for mobility.