Many folks are going to be horrified at that price, but I look at it as less than autopilots cost back in the day. I think these will fly off the shelf for professional end users. Moores law seems not to apply to unmanned aviation, its too slow.
“Velodyne’s LiDAR Puck has the potential to be truly transformational, an enabling technology for a vast array of price-sensitive applications,” Hall said. “The introductory pricing of $7,999 for this next-generation LiDAR sensor makes choosing the ‘Puck’ a total no brainer for any automation or robotics application requiring timely 3D vision.
There’s no longer any need to go through the hassle of combining several 2D sensors or mount one 2D sensor on a ‘nodding’ platform, now that one 3D sensor can do the job conveniently and at an even lower price point than multiple 2D sensors.”
Full press release
Wolfgang speaking about Velodyne at sUSB Expo 14
Comments
That pretty much sums up lidar for uav's, under $100k and it's probably garbage... That's across the pond translation : ) Hey, has LidarPod integrated a photogrammetry mount? Saw them last year at the Denver convention, sexy looking unit with all that carbon.
We are the preferred supplier of data from the LidarPod by Routescene. If you speak to them to try and get data, they will pass you onto us :)
The LidarPod is a great unit and can do dual return. With accuracies better than 60mm, it compares well to full sized aircraft units.
Just so you know, the Velodyne, isn't a liDAR unit, its just the scanner part. Any LiDAR unit which costs less than £50k is a pile of rubbish so don't go near them. LidarPod includes an accurate AHRS, RTK GNSS and all the software/ hardware needed to fly. Attitude needs to be accurate to less than 0.1 degrees for it to be any good. That is based on having Kalman filters on board to filter out the noise. Trust me...LiDAR isn't that easy to start putting together yourselves! Leave it to the experts :)
If you need some data, feel free to get in touch. We are operational now, and can collect data next week if you need it :)
James
Remote Aerial Surveys
www.remoteaerialsurveys.co.uk
Sure, both Phoenix and Reigl systems can be setup stationary. But even more useful, you mount to a car, atv, backpack or whatever moves about your scanning area. I believe the car mount is included with the Phoenix system.
XactSense looks interesting. I was trying to decide between the Routescene Lidarpod or the Phoenix AL3. I was leaning towards the Lidarpod given it's weight compared to the AL2, but the AL3 is almost as light as the Lidarpod. Routescene doesn't spec the IMU which I find a bit weird. Anyone out there using either of these units? Hard to get much info.
http://www.routescene.com/products/product/uav-lidarpod/
http://www.phoenix-aerial.com/products/phoenix-lidar-systems/al3/
And to think our company was contemplating purchasing the HDL32e... 1/3 the price. I wish the supporting equipment cost came down in price as well. The lidar head is just the beginning of an operational lidar system for a uav.
Sorry for stating the obvious, I didn't realise he mentions this fact two minutes into the talk.
Velodyne are the company that make the Lidars for googles self driving cars, so a very reputable company.
It is worth nothing that the price reflects this being a true LiDAR sensor with a 360deg horizontal and 30deg vertical scan. Resulting in a true 3D point cloud of the surroundings (press release claims 300,000 points/sec).
Most hobby range sensors are not true LiDAR, but instead 360 range finders scanning a single line along the horizontal plane.
I agree that this kind of LIDAR sensor - I presume rotating will be very important for a lot of future uses.
Although this is really still too pricey for most of us, there will undoubtedly be more as competition increases and eventually the prices will come down to where we can afford them too.
Right now, probably the cheapest thing available to us is the Kinect V2 sensor for Windows.
It uses a real 3D TOF camera as opposed to the old Kinects dot offset system.
And it still suffers from over illumination situations (direct daylight).
Of course for 2D Lidar type sensors, there is still the Neato and a few Kickstarter knock off scanners.
It is also possible to scan in 2D or 3D a conventional laser range finder (like the one soon to be offered by 3DR).
And with the new powerful tiny microcomputers and multi-GPU graphics processors, Optical flow and even more interestingly stereo 3D cameras are beginning to become realistic options.
I think most of the interesting things that will happen in our future will relate to how we deal with position and motion in relation to a real time analysis of our environment and less related to absolute position - although both are good.
Best Regards,
Gary
This is an amazing price point given the starting point of velodyne.
I could see airplanes installing these as a way to avoid other aircraft.