This week, Blackmore announced two new lidar products. This announcement expands Blackmore’s range of solutions built on the company’s frequency-modulation lidar systems. These sensors are unique primarily for their ability to offer both range and velocity measurements, which enables processing software to more accurately determine whether the object in your path is a moving car, a pile or dirt, or a pedestrian.
The Blackmore AFDL (autonomous fleet doppler lidar) is designed specifically for easy deployment of autonomous vehicle fleets. The Blackmore LDP (lidar development platform) is meant to enable developers of new autonomous applications like robots, trucks, or air taxis (!) to get the systems they need with a minimum of integration work.
AFDL – low power, multiple beams, faster decisions
First things first, the AFDL has a 120° horizontal field of view, a range of 450 meters, and scans at about 2.4 million points per second. It runs on less than 100 watts—about what you’d expect from a small laptop. The AFDL also offers motion resolution of 0.1 meters per second, and is sensitive to motion across a high dynamic range out to about 150 meters per second.
During a phone conversation in advance of the announcement, Blackmore explained to SPAR how they managed this upgrade over its previous products: the AFDL features multiple beams over the field of view, making it perhaps the first FM-based doppler lidar to do so.
Blackmore told us it developed the product to serve companies looking to roll out fleets of autonomous vehicles. A number of these companies contacted Blackmore wanting an FM-based lidar for their fleets, because its combination of data reduced what’s called the “time to perception,” or the amount of time any given sensor needs to collect enough data for the autonomous system to make good decisions about how to drive.
The sensor is available now for preorder below the US $20,000 price point, with units shipping to customers in Q2 of 2019.