Why you should be interested in LiDAR technologies?

LiDAR technologies are soaring high! Studies published by Inkwood Research, Grand View Research, Markets And Markets, and Research And Markets confirm this.

The automotive industry is changing with LiDAR technology as the key enabler. The report by Research And Markets says that the automotive LiDAR market should then reach more than $100M in revenue by 2020 and grow up to $44B in 2050. Advanced driver assistance systems(ADAS) and Autonomous cars use LiDAR technology. Automatic emergency braking(AEB) and Adaptive cruise control(ACC) are two dominant components that use LiDAR technology in ADAS. According to Markets And Markets, the market for ADAS driverless car is estimated to grow at the highest during this period.

While prominent automakers are making enormous investments in this technology, Autonomoustuff, BLOM, Raymetric LiDAR System, FARO Technologies are the key players. Ford, Nvidia, and BOSCH are the top contenders. U.S, Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, India, China, Brazil, and Mexico are the countries which are adopting these technologies in autonomous cars and new mobilities at a faster rate than rest of the world.

Widely sought LiDAR services are map generation and annotation. Voyage, a self-driving car startup, collaborates with Scale API for its annotation needs and Renovo for its map generation. Point cloud processing tools like VisionLidar costs approximately $4032 while LASTools costs around EUR 4000.

So it won’t be surprising to see a rise in demand for experts in LiDAR technology in coming days. Even though LiDAR sensors are prohibitively expensive, there are many datasets available for developers to make their hands dirty. Some notable datasets are KITTI dataset, Berkeley DeepDrive, and Baidu Apollo dataset. This post by Prerak Mody has a curated list of datasets for autonomous vehicles. So, what are you waiting for?

Why you should be interested in LiDAR technologies? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.