LiDAR News: Benewake, Ouster, Quanergy, Ibeo, Conti

Benewake LiDAR is used to check toilet occupancy in an airport:

"In order to save time for passengers to use the toilet and reduce congestion in public toilets, some time ago, "Urumchi Diwopu International Airport" in China adopted Benewake LiDAR (TF-Luna). The use of TF-Luna can detect the toilet traffic and remaining squatting space. Both data can be displayed on the screen outside the toilet. This system solution not only relieves the congestion of public toilets, but also saves the time for users to select toilets, and plays a significant role in improving the utilization rate of public toilets and passenger satisfaction."

EETimes reporter Junko Yoshida publishes an article about Ouster LiDAR internals:

"In an interview with EE Times last week, Ouster’s founder and CEO Angus Pacala boasted that his company has already picked up 700 design wins over 15 different industries in 50 countries.

Impressive, but where’s Outster’s advantage?

Pacala said, “We chose technology designed to work in many markets.” Ouster has developed a lidar platform built on “all-CMOS semiconductors.” That makes Ouster’s products “digital lidars,” according to Pacala.

Ouster’s competitors, including Velodyne and Waymo, deploy hundreds of off-the-shelf discrete components to make their spinning lidars work. In contrast, Ouster has developed tightly integrated custom vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) and another ASIC that incorporates single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) arrays.

Ouster’s platform also includes Xilinx’s FPGA, responsible for processing massive amount of data."

Quanergy unveils the MQ-8 3D LiDAR and perception software which are part of Quanergy’s Flow Management platform. Designed with a new smart beam configuration, the MQ-8 solution delivers up to 140 m continuous tracking range, enabling up to 15,000 m2 coverage with a single sensor for flow management applications like security, smart city, social distancing and smart space industries.