Cepton Develops Cost-effective Vista Lidar

Cepton has announced development on a new low-power, long-range, high-resolution, and small-size Lidar sensor called Vista. The Lidar was announced at the 2018 NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference.

Vista is intended to be a cost-effective solution for those who pursue all levels of autonomous driving, active safety, or mapping applications. The 120 line scanner has a 200 metre range, 0.2 degrees of spatial resolution, and consumes less than 10 watts of power. Cepton explains that the sensor “consists only of high maturity automotive components for expedited automotive grade certification” and features their patented micro-motion technology (MMT) platform, no rotational or frictional parts, and is significantly smaller than most solutions in the market. This means automakers can “seamlessly integrate lidar technology into the vehicle body”.

Additionally, Cepton’s partnership with NVIDIA opens up the possibility of using the NVIDIA DRIVE platform for advanced processing of Cepton’s Lidar data. This AI supercomputer combines deep learning and sensor fusion to accurately paint a full, 360 degree environment representing dynamic and static objects encompassing the vehicle.

“Automotive Lidar like Cepton’s is a key sensing technology to enable self-driving efforts”, said Glenn Schuster, senior director, technical marketing, NVIDIA. “Lidar generates a massive amount of data and needs the computer horsepower of an AI supercomputer to understand what is around the vehicle.”

Vista Lidar samples are available for Cepton’s automotive partners, while automated production at scale will start in Q2, 2018.