A new Ouster brand lidar is coming to replace cameras

Tech companies have spent the last decade asking whether self-driving cars need lidar sensors, cameras, or all of the above. Lidar company Ouster says it has a new solution: put both in one sensor.

On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced a new line of lidar sensors it calls “Rev8,” all of which offer what it calls “native color lidar.” These sensors can capture color images and three depth information simultaneously, performing the function of two sensors in one.

The CEO of Ouster Angus Pacala said that this development has been in his company for ten years, and he was not shy about the new invention in an interview with TechCrunch, calling it “the holy grail of what the roboticist has been looking for.”

“Throughout human history, it’s been done: you buy a lidar sensor, you buy a camera, and you try to understand the integration with advanced concepts, and spend a lot of time doing it,” he told TechCrunch. “And companies only get to the middle of managing and integrating data.”

Ouster’s new sensors, he said, will change this equation.

“The goal is to get rid of the cameras. There’s no reason why one device can’t do it all,” he said.

The Rev8 line arrives at a dynamic time for the lidar industry. There have been years of mergers going on, with Ouster buying Velodyne, and Luminar’s. Recently acquired property in bankruptcy.

At the same time, the sensor market is exploding. Waymo and others have finally shipped working robotaxis and are rapidly expanding. The robotics industry – humanoid and industrial – is raising investment capital and needs sensors to perceive the world. There is so much interest in this space that new companies like Boston-based Teradar are emerging and testing the waters with new methods. (In Teradar’s case, it’s using terahertz imaging.)

A color lidar that combines depth information with camera-type images could be very important to robotic players, Pacala said. And he said Ouster worked with Fujifilm and the imaging science company DXOMARK to understand “what it means to make a good camera.”

In fact, Pacala says the Ouster-style lidar is “in many ways better than the current camera” because of the way the company designs and manufactures its sensors.

Ouster uses an architecture called “digital lidar”. Instead of the analog method, which involves many moving parts, Ouster captures lidar data directly from its device using what are known as single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors.

The company is using the same SPAD technology to capture color images in the Rev8 sensors. Pacala said that the new technique allows him to take a picture that is much more difficult than a conventional camera.

“It’s a 48-bit, 116 dB of powerful color, like a mega pixel resolution. These are high numbers that make it pound for pound a good camera. But it just so happens that it’s coming as a stream of data that has never been seen before as a 3D cloud,” he said. “You can also use that information as a camera stream, but that’s one of the strengths of this system, you can use the lidar data stream, you can use the camera data stream, or you can use a pre-selected data stream, depending on what your observation group is.

Pacala said his company has already sent samples to existing customers and is now taking orders. He said he was most proud of the OS1 Max sensor, which he said he considered “the best lidar in the industry.” It can see 500 meters in all directions and is smaller than other long-range radars “on the big side.”

“We’ve had LiDAR for a long time, but it hasn’t been more expensive than anything else,” he said. “That’s a big leap for Ouster. I think that means we’re going to start seeing a lot of it in high-speed vehicles, robotaxis, I think a lot of drone stuff will transition to OS1 Max.”

Other new lidars built on the Rev8 platform will include OS0, OS1, and OSDome, according to a press release.

Ouster is not the only company that has started talking about the lidar model. Last month, the Chinese company Hesai announced its own type of lidar platform which is said to begin mass production later this year. Some companies, such as Innoviz, have developed their own “lidar model”.

Pacala says many other players who try to “bundle” cameras and lidar sensors put them together in a box. Ouster’s approach (and, to be fair, Hesai) is taking and putting lidar and imaging technology on the same chip.

This greatly reduces the amount of work Ouster customers have to do to understand customer streams, Pacala said, and it also allows customers to monitor all cameras — both cheaper and less expensive than previous Ouster technology.

“This is a real change in what we’re selling to the customer from now on,” he told TechCrunch.