Yesterday I (Paul McLellan) wrote a sort of overview of the Cadence Automotive Summit that took place in November, in the post Automotive Summit: The Road to an Autonomous Future. Today, the focus in on a key part of automating driving, namely sensors.
One of the first non-Cadence presentations of the day was Manju Hegde, the CEO of Uhnder… (more to this section of the article on the cadence website)
Thermal
Chuck Gershman of Owl Autonomous Imaging added a fourth sensor type to the mix: thermal. I won’t cover everything he said, a lot was a similar analysis of the strength and weakness of various sensor types. But the big advantage of thermal is that it can detect living objects, and it works the same in day and night and has all-weather operation.
Lidar alone is not good enough since it sees but doesn’t understand. Plus lidar range is seriously reduced in bad weather. 905nm lidar, in particular, goes blind in fog and rain. Owl has a focal plane array (FPA) 2-color detector that they have delivered to the Air Force.
“Unlike in the Sixth Sense, we see live people,” Said Chuck Gershman.
Read the full article by Paul McLellan on the Cadence website.
