Luminar unveils industry’s first full-stack autonomous system for series production with Zenseact

Luminar partners closely with Zenseact, a newly-formed 550-person software company owned by Volvo Cars, to deliver safe autonomy to both Volvo Cars and the larger automotive industry

Luminar Technologies, the global leader in automotive lidar hardware and software technology, announced it has partnered closely with Zenseact to deliver autonomous software for series production vehicles. Volvo Cars is the first launch customer, representing both Luminar’s and Zenseact’s first production design win for software. Zenseact is a newly-formed 550-person team of top ADAS and autonomous software experts having uniquely developed software products in series production.

Luminar’s new product suite, Sentinel, is the first full-stack autonomous solution for series production in the industry. It deeply integrates Zenseact’s OnePilot autonomous driving software solution alongside Luminar’s Iris lidar, perception software, and other components as a foundation, enabling every automaker to offer Highway Autonomy and Proactive SafetyTM capabilities on their production vehicles. While the wider autonomous industry largely focuses on robo-taxi applications, Luminar and Zenseact collectively remain focused on delivering systems into series production vehicles.

“Zenseact has greater experience in advanced ADAS and autonomous software for production vehicles than anyone I’ve seen in the industry, having decades of experience delivering to Volvo Cars and nearly a dozen other production programs,” said Austin Russell, Founder and CEO of Luminar. “We are working together day in and out to deliver this comprehensive autonomous software solution for Volvo Cars, and now are making this solution available to the industry at large. For Luminar, this is key in our transformation from a lidar provider to a software and systems company, enabling autonomy and improved vehicle safety to become ubiquitous.”

“The whole point of autonomous driving technology is to reduce accidents and save lives. This alliance enables us together to make that technology more broadly accessible and thus even more impactful,” said Ödgärd Andersson, CEO of Zenseact. “Early in Luminar’s journey I met Austin and the Luminar team, and realized we share the same vision of relentlessly developing the very best possible technology to save lives. We have collaborated ever since, and I continue to be impressed by the growing team of highly-skilled engineers and experts at Luminar and their uncompromising approach to increasing safety on roads.”

Zenseact is responsible for delivering its OnePilot software and Luminar’s perception software to Volvo Cars, while Luminar is responsible for providing the holistic Sentinel solution to other automakers.

Sentinel will equip global automakers with two core functionalities – Proactive SafetyTM and hands-off, eyes-off Highway Autonomy:

Proactive SafetyTM: For the first time, vehicles can proactively avoid collisions with evasive maneuvers, reducing accident rates by up to seven times. The most advanced camera-based ADAS systems will attempt to reactively avoid collisions only in ideal conditions, in a straight line, and generally after the driver does not respond.

Highway autonomy: Hands-free, eyes-free true autonomous driving on highways – as opposed to the most advanced ADAS systems, which require constant driver attention and system overrides at a moment’s notice, defeating the main purpose of autonomy – to recover the driver’s time and substantially improve vehicle safety.

Sentinel is powered in part by Zenseact’s OnePilot software, which helps provide a single user experience throughout the user’s journey. OnePilot continuously assesses the surroundings to enable autonomous highway driving. OnePilot also provides the driver with useful information and warnings and may intervene by overriding controls to make sure the user has a safe journey.

Sentinel also incorporates over-the-air updates to expand the operating domain of autonomy and further improve safety of vehicles over time.