Geo Week News

January 26, 2019

Cepton adds two lidars to its low-cost Vista line for autonomous vehicles

CeptonVista_001

As the race for the best automotive lidar continues, Cepton adds two new sensors to its Vista lidar series.

Announced last year, the Vista series primarily focuses on delivering a low-cost & high-performance solution for all levels of autonomous driving. With upgraded specifications over the standard Vista, the Vista M and the Vista X bring new development opportunities for vehicle manufacturers.

While the standard Vista featured a 60º field-of-view (FOV), the Vista X doubles it to 120º. This results in improved object perception and localization in a much wider area. In addition, whereas the standard version featured a maximum scanning range of 200 meters, the Vista X goes beyond that limit on 10% reflectivity targets. “The uniform 0.2-degree spatial resolution across the entire FOV eliminates the complexity and safety risk in run-time FOV configurations enabling the design flexibility to integrate Vista-X into the front, back or inside of the vehicle.”

About the size of a box of crayons, the Vista M lidar also features a 120º FOV and a scanning range of 150 meters. According to Cepton, the sensor “provides ideal detection capability for vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles from the four corners of autonomous vehicles.” Although the scanning range is lower than the standard Vista, the M version is smaller, making it easier to integrate with a vehicle, as it fits the headlights, taillights, and side view mirrors.

With the existing partnership between Cepton and Nvidia, the two new sensors will also use Nvidia Drive, the AI supercomputer that combines deep learning and sensor fusion to accurately paint a full, 360-degree environment representing dynamic and static objects encompassing the vehicle.

“High performance and cost-efficient lidar, such as Cepton’s Vista solutions, are important developments that will help bring self-driving vehicles to market,” said Glenn Schuster, senior director, technical marketing, NVIDIA. “By leveraging the Nvidia Drive platform’s high-performance computational capabilities for processing Cepton lidar data, vehicles can get an accurate representation of their surrounding environment to autonomously navigate.”

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