Hi, I'm Matt Weed, senior director of product
at Luminar Technologies.
I'm here at CES 2022, and I'm going to talk a little bit
about the technologies we've been developing and looking to
deploy in the next few years.
A big priority for Luminar over the last couple of years has
been getting deeper and deeper into software development based
on our lidar technology.
Building point clouds is great, but doing something
with them is even greater and allows us to have a better
and better impact.
And so that's really what our focus has been; trying to find
ways to extract understanding from the point clouds, but then
be able to have vehicles plan and act.
To be able to have really strong functionality
in the field.
Bringing our technology into the real world
is really important.
But as a baby step before we set it loose on the streets,
having activity on the test tracks is essential.
So we've been doing that a lot over the last year,
bringing our lidar, integrated into vehicles,
bringing it on the track, bringing test targets and
dummies to bear so that we can test this before we bring it
into the real world.
And what we've been working on and underpinning a lot of
what's driving our company forward is called
Proactive Safety, the ability to give a vehicle
understanding about what's going on in the environment
with enough time and distance so that it can act proactively
to save lives.
And Proactive Safety is special because it operates regardless of who's in
control of the vehicle, whether it be you as a human or
automated system like a robot.
It underpins the safety envelope of the vehicle,
whether you're in neighborhoods, on highways,
in dense traffic, in open roads.
So let's take a look at how it operates in a neighborhood.
So if we think about what a vehicle needs to know to be
able to operate safely, we look at the understanding it needs
to have about its environment.
So we understand the free space where it can drive. So. the road
as differentiated from curbs or the sidewalk.
We look at the detection of how that road space is broken up
into Lanes… see road crossings, as well as the
detection of pedestrians, cars, obstacles, any of those kinds
of things and their relation to each other in
that drivable space.
As an example case, we'll look at here is the example of a
child chasing a ball into a street in a neighborhood at the
end of the day with poor lighting.
In this scenario, the car is traveling 25 MPH
At first detection of this child, we're at about
15 meters away, about one and a quarter seconds.
That gives us time to start proactively preparing the
vehicle to perform a maneuver, whether the human initiates
that maneuver or we have to as a safety system.
Within that one and a quarter seconds, we now need
to maintain 10 meters, which about a half a second of
time to perform the braking maneuver, which gives
us a little bit of time to do some things in the vehicle.
So in this time, we're preparing the
brake system, so we're starting to prime the brakes, run brake
fluid so that when we perform a maneuver, the vehicle
is more responsive.
We can start sending signals to the vehicle's restraint systems
to start tightening the seatbelts in case of this
eventual braking condition so that they're more
comfortable as passengers.
We can start sending alerts to the driver to try to draw their
attention to where it needs to be in the driving scene.
All of these things give us the proactive nature of the of the
vehicle system so that when the action needs to happen,
the vehicle's ready and prepared.
And as the scene progresses and the vehicle continues,
driving and gets closer.
We find ourselves now 10 meters away,
confirming detection of this child with about
half second left.
That means we're in that window where we need to take action.
The driver hasn't initiated the braking maneuver and so
we take over.
And with all of the preparation we've had, we're ready there to
make the maneuver happen.
Stop the vehicle in time to save the child's life.
This is the moment that really could have been tragic for,
of course, this child, for the driver, but we were
able to avoid it.
And that's really what drives the mission of
Proactive Safety forward.
But Proactive Safety isn't just for neighborhoods, isn't just
for driver support when moving into the world of autonomy.
The highway is the place that will first see consumers with
vehicles that will be able to drive themselves competently.
The hard part is making it possible to be safe and
reliable as it's driving.
And so we see here standard highway driving.
Again, very simple.
We look at what the lidar sees as it drives through
this scenario, being able to understand the road where the
road edges are picking up the lane markers and all the other
cars and road users and knowing where they are in those lanes.
But again, this is the easy part.
With Proactive Safety, as is underpinning, however,
keeping out for weird things, dangerous things,
dynamic things that happen.
In this case, what we see is a truck that's ahead of us or
lead vehicle starts to lose cargo.
So if we look at the freeze frame of time when
this happens, this cargo is now hitting the road about 100
meters ahead of us, we're able to detect that really well,
understand exactly how large this debris now is, where it is
that it is indeed in our lane and how far away it is so that
we have a very accurate understanding of what again,
our time to collision would be.
In this case, because we're able to detect it
so far ahead,
we've got a lot of time.
We've got three and a half seconds.
Now this is not a lot of time when you're driving 65 MPH
as in this case, but what this allows the system to do
now is plan and adapt it and think about what we can do
instead of just hitting the brakes again.
In this case, what we see is that we have time to be able to
identify space in a neighboring lane.
Be able to make that maneuver and really importantly,
have enough time to tell the driver, Hey, we're going to
be making a maneuver.
This helps build confidence and autonomy systems so the vehicle
doesn't start moving without any warning.
And this is the kind of thing that Proactive Safety and
autonomy live symbiotically.
These are not two separate technologies.
Proactive Safety underpins all of the things that are possible
in these vehicles, and autonomy kind of emerges from
that safety envelope.
So as we go forward into the next year, it's really exciting
to see ourselves moving into functions, showing the
world with possible finding ways to integrate these
solutions into our customers'
Full vehicle stacks, driving deeper and deeper into what's
possible with lidar all the way from sensing
through action.