The founder of the world’s top LiDAR maker says there’s one problem with Elon Musk’s approach to self-driving

• Steven Qiu is the founder and chief scientist of Chinese LiDAR maker RoboSense.

• Qiu said the multi-sensor system is safer than the vision-only system for driverless vehicles.

• Tesla CEO Elon Musk has long criticized LiDAR, calling it “expensive and unnecessary.”

Steven Qiu, founder of Chinese LiDAR maker RoboSense, says a multi-sensor system is a better and safer approach to driverless vehicles than the vision-only system touted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

LiDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, is a sensor that scans the environment by emitting laser beams and measures the time required to receive a return signal. You can find LiDAR on: Waymo’s robot axis and consumer products such as robot vacuum cleaners and smartphone cameras.

“Over the last 10 years, when it comes to autonomous vehicles, there’s been a lot of debate about whether a vision-only approach or a multi-sensor approach is better,” Qiu told Business Insider on the sidelines of the FutureChina Global Forum in Singapore in September.

“But it’s clear now that everyone understands that a vision-only approach is not secure enough. There are many corner cases that a vision-only system cannot account for,” he added.

Qiu told Business Insider that vehicles won’t be able to achieve Level 3 or Level 4 driving automation capability with a vision system alone. To do this, other sensors, including LiDAR, must be added to the mix, he added.

Standards organization SAE International ranks automation systems from Levels 1 to 5. Level 1 systems can only provide basic assistance such as automatic braking and lane keeping, while Level 5 systems can operate a vehicle in any condition. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software It requires human supervision and is a Level 2 system.

“Let’s say you’re traveling on a highway. If a white car stopped in front of you, it would be difficult for a vision-only system to tell whether it was a car or a white cloud in the sky,” Qiu said.

“Similarly, if you are heading into a tunnel, the system may not be able to tell if there is a black car in front of you,” he added.

RoboSense, founded in 2014, has the world’s largest market share in passenger vehicle LiDAR systems by 2024, market research group Yole Group said in a report published in March.

Musk has long been a critic LiDAR systemsincluding recently August. Musk said on Tesla in April 2019: “Autonomy Day“It’s an event where automakers will eventually stop using LiDAR technology in their driverless vehicles.

“I should point out that I actually don’t hate LiDAR as much as it seems,” Musk said, adding that SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft uses LiDAR to navigate and dock with the International Space Station.

“This is stupid in cars. It’s expensive and unnecessary,” he continued. “Once you fix the vision problem, it’s worth nothing. So you have expensive equipment in your car that’s worthless.”

The cost of LiDAR systems has fallen significantly over the past few years, from about $70,000 per vehicle to a few hundred dollars, Qiu said. He added that as costs continue to decrease, the performance capabilities of LiDAR systems also increase.

Musk’s views on LiDAR appear to be in the minority among automotive executives. CEO of Ford Jim Farley He told the Aspen Ideas Festival in June that his company sees LiDAR as “mission critical.”

“For example, in a situation that would completely blind the reflection behind a truck or the sun in the camera’s eyes, the LiDAR system will see it fully,” Farley said.

Li Xiang, CEO of Chinese EV maker Li Auto, said at his company’s “AI Talk” event last year that Musk failed to see the value of LiDAR because traffic conditions in America and China are very different.

“If you drive in China at night, you often see trucks with broken tail lights, or even trucks with non-functioning tail lights, parked on the road,” he said, adding that current camera systems cannot detect these trucks from a distance.

“If Musk were in China and driving on various highways late at night, I believe he would choose to include LiDAR,” he added.

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