Light-Sensors Help Autonomous Street Cleaners Get Around
Everyone knows about RADAR, but fewer people have had any experience with LIDAR. Where RADAR uses radio waves to paint a picture of surroundings, LIDAR uses light, allowing for higher-quality resolution and potential construction of a 3D image of the surrounding area. This technology is an instrumental one for self-driving vehicles. A partnership between Idriverplus and Velodyne LIDAR may soon have us witnessing autonomous street-cleaning vehicles navigating themselves around urban areas with the help of light detection and ranging hardware.
Increased Quality of Navigation
LIDAR is an important technology because it allows for far more accurate movements from vehicles outfitted with it. While RADAR focuses on using radio-waves for imaging, LIDAR’s higher resolution comes from its use of light waves to develop sophisticated 3D images of the vehicle’s surroundings. Idriverplus is an autonomous vehicle manufacturer from China and intends to put into production thousands of its driverless machines on China’s roads as street-cleaning vehicles. These vehicles will be outfitted with two Puck sensors to aid in their navigation and perception of surroundings. The sensors will be manufactured for Idriverplus by Velodyne. In choosing Velodyne for their sensor manufacturer, Idriverplus noted that the company’s sensors were of superior quality than others on the market. Additionally, the sensors are compact and offer an excellent resolution for objects up to one hundred meters away.
Autonomous Car Solutions Coming Soon
Not content to dominate the street-cleaner market, Idriverplus is also looking at launching a series of autonomous cars for passenger use soon. The company claims that it will have an SAE Level-4 vehicle ready for use soon, designed to drive in closed parks and a few public roadways. The company’s focus on autonomous cars makes them unique in approaching the problem, and their innovations will likely spur other companies into action. In the West, companies like Tesla and BMW are already trying to develop autonomous vehicles that can navigate themselves from place to place.
