San Francisco - Spacecraft use it to measure distance. Farmers use it to work out which fields need fertiliser. Archaeologists use it to map topography. And, crucially for Uber Technologies and Alphabet’s Waymo, self-driving cars use lidar to navigate.
As car makers and technology entrants scramble to develop autonomous vehicles, lidar has become a highly coveted technology. And now it’s at the centre of a lawsuit pitting Waymo against Uber, the ride-hailing upstart seeking to create its own autonomous vehicle empire.
Waymo, the self-driving car business of Google parent Alphabet, accused Uber in a court filing on Thursday of stealing its lidar designs. Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski downloaded 9.7GB of files before he left to found a start-up that was subsequently acquired by Uber, the company said in the suit.
“Misappropriating this technology is akin to stealing a secret recipe from a beverage company,” Waymo said in a blog post on Medium. “We believe these actions were part of a concerted plan to steal Waymo’s trade secrets and intellectual property.
“We take the allegations made against Otto and Uber employees seriously and we will review this matter carefully,” Uber spokesperson Chelsea Kohler wrote in an e-mail. A look at the technology at work in lidar - and the role it plays in helping cars drive by themselves - helps explain why the companies consider it so vital.
Read also: Uber relies on stolen tech
Lidar is a radar-like system that uses lasers instead of radio waves to build a 3-D image of the surrounding landscape. Since satellite navigation systems are only accurate to within 4.9m and can easily be flummoxed by high-rise and glass-fronted buildings, autonomous vehicles require an array of other sensors to position themselves precisely and maintain awareness of nearby pedestrians, vehicles and other objects.
Waymo has its own lidar. Lidar specialists such as Velodyne Lidar say that to cut the driver completely and permanently out of the equation, the technology is essential. The Morgan Hill, California-based company counts Tesla, Uber, Google and car makers such as Ford and Volkswagen among its customers.
The main hurdle to lidar becoming a widely adopted technology in mass-produced cars is cost. A 64-channel unit from Velodyne can cost more than $50 000 (R646 195), while the lower-end 16-channel product sells for $7999.
Since a car might require several lidar units, it quickly makes the cost prohibitive for anything but the most expensive luxury cars. Velodyne and competitors such as Quanergy Systems are working to reduce the price. That would be accelerated by major orders for mass market cars.