Austin Russell hops in a motorized cart and goes whizzing through a cavernous building on the edge of San Francisco Bay that is normally used to disembark cruise-ship passengers.
As the lanky 22-year-old CEO tools around, he passes a mannequin, a tire and a co-worker on a bicycle–all elements of a demonstration to show how well his company’s sensor can monitor the environment. On a nearby screen, those shapes appear in rainbow colors that signify exactly how far away they are.
All of it is the result of laser beams shooting out of a black box and bouncing off more than a million points around the room every second.
“It’s easy to make an autonomous vehicle that works 99% of the time,” Russell says later. “But the challenge is in that last 1% of all the different edge cases that can be presented to a driver.”
Edge cases could mean anything from a sudden sleet storm to late-night carousers overflowing into the street. In order for self-driving cars to become a reality, vehicles must “see not just some of the objects some of the time, but all objects all the time,” says Russell, head of a firm called Luminar.
Like an increasing number of entrepreneurs and investors, he believes that technology known as lidar–a shortened name for light detection and ranging–is a key part of the answer. More than $400 million has been invested in the field in the past few years. “Everyone’s circling and looking for opportunities within autonomy,” says CB Insights analyst Kerry Wu.
To read more of the original article, go to Time.
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