Ouster’s new color lidar will come to replace the cameras

The technology industry has spent the past decade wondering whether self-driving cars need lidar sensors, cameras, or all of the above. Lidar company Ouster says it has a new answer: put them in the same sensor.

On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced a new line of lidar sensors it calls “Rev8,” all of which offer so-called “native color lidar.” These sensors are capable of capturing color images and 3D depth information at the same time, acting as two sensors in one device.

Ouster CEO Angus Pacala said it had been a decade in development at his company, and he wasn’t shy about his ambitions for the new product range in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, calling it “the holy grail of what the robotics world has always wanted.”

“For the entire history of humanity, it’s been like this: You buy a lidar sensor, you buy a camera, you try to understand the combination with some higher-level logic, and you waste an enormous amount of time doing that,” he told TechCrunch. “And companies are only halfway there in terms of standardizing and integrating data flows.”

The new Oster sensors change that equation, he said.

“The goal is to avoid cameras. There’s no reason why a single sensor can’t do both,” he said.

The Rev8 lineup arrives at a dynamic moment for lidar companies. There has been a long wave of mergers that have taken place, with Ouster buying Velodyne, Luminar’s Recently acquired assets In bankruptcy.

At the same time, the sensor market is experiencing tremendous growth. Waymo and others have finally deployed working robotic robots and are rapidly scaling them up. Robotics companies – human and industrial – are raising investment money and need sensors to sense the world. There is so much interest in the field that new companies have emerged such as Boston-based Teradar Testing the waters in entirely new ways. (In the case of Teradar, terahertz imaging is used.)

A color lidar that combines precise depth information with camera-quality image data could be especially valuable to robotics players, Pacala said. Ouster worked with Fujifilm and image science company DXOMARK to understand “what it means to create a great camera,” he said.

In fact, Pacala claims that Ouster’s color lidar technology “improves in many ways over a modern camera” thanks to the way the company already designs and builds its sensors.

Ouster uses what is called a “digital lidar” architecture. Instead of the analog approach, which involves many moving parts, Ouster captures lidar information directly on its custom chip using what are known as single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors.

The company uses the same SPAD technology to capture color image data in its Rev8 sensors. Pacala said that this new technology allows images to be captured more sensitively than a regular camera.

“It’s 48-bit color, 116 dB of dynamic range, like megapixel resolution. Those are the top line numbers that make it tick for the pound of a good camera. But it just so happens that it comes as a pre-embedded data stream as a 3D color point cloud,” he said. “You can actually use the data as a camera stream as well, but that’s one of the powers of this system, where you can use just the lidar data stream, or you can use just the camera data stream, or you can use the pre-integrated data stream, depending on how kind of forward-thinking your perception team is.”

Pacala said his company has already shipped samples to existing customers and is now taking orders. He said he’s particularly proud of the OS1 Max sensor, which he said he considers “the best long-range lidar sensor in the industry.” It can see up to 500 meters in all directions, which is smaller than other long-range lidars “by a significant margin.”

“We had a long-range LiDAR, but it wasn’t clearly better than anything else,” he said. “This is a big jump for Ouster. I think that means we’ll start to see it more in high-speed automated trucking applications, robotaxi applications, and I think a lot of the drone elements will move over to OS1 Max.”

Other new lidars built on the Rev8 platform will include OS0, OS1 and OSDome, according to a press release.

Ouster isn’t the only company starting to talk about color lidar. Last month, the Chinese company Hesai announced Special color lidar platform Which says it will enter mass production by the end of this year. Other companies, such as Innoviz, have previously come up with their own ideas for “color lidar.”

Most other players trying to “integrate” cameras and lidar sensors bundle them together in a box, Pacala says. The approach taken by Ouster (and, to be fair, Hesai) is to put lidar and imaging on the same chip.

This dramatically reduces the amount of work Ouster customers have to do to understand competing sensor streams, and it also causes those customers to eventually eschew cameras altogether — all while being cheaper and smaller than previous Ouster technology, Pacala said.

“This is kind of a radical change to the value proposition of what we’re selling to the customer from this point forward,” he told TechCrunch.