this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
892 points (95.8% liked)

Technology

59572 readers
3235 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Because that’s expensive and can be done with a camera.

Expensive, as in probably less than $600? Compared to the $35000 cost of a tesla?

(comparing the cost of the iPhone 12 (without lidar) and iPhone 12 pro (with lidar), we can guess that the sensor probably costs less than $200, so 3 of them (for left, right, and front) would cost probably less than $600)

lidar can actually be very cheap and small. Unfortunately, Apple bought the only company that seems to make sensors like that (besides some other super high end models)

There have been a lot of promising research papers on the technology lately though, so I expect more, higher resolution and cheaper lidar sensors to be available relatively soon (next couple years probably).

[–] Grippler@feddit.dk 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yeah that's not even remotely the same type of sensor used in robotics and autonomous cars. Yes lidar is getting cheaper, but for high detail long range detection they're much more expensive than the case of your iphone example. The iPhone "lidar" is less than useless in an automotive context.