Ouster takes on Waymo with Lidar diversity

By Junko Yoshida for EETIMES – With the automotive lidar market in flux, lidar vendors are hunting for ancillary markets. Waymo is taking its home-grown lidar to cast a wider net beyond automotive, where it’s strong, into lidar-hungry markets that range from robotics to surveillance and agriculture. Ouster, a San Francisco-based lidar startup founded in 2016, is confident it can beat Waymo at its own game in non-automotive markets.

The upstart Ouster has a variety of lidar models designed to meet the needs of multiple markets. In contrast, Waymo is plunging into the vast non-automotive market with just one model, Honeycomb.

In an interview with EE Times last week, Ouster’s founder and CEO Angus Pacala boasted that his company has already picked up 700 design wins over 15 different industries in 50 countries.

Pacala said, “We chose technology designed to work in many markets.” Ouster has developed a lidar platform built on “all-CMOS semiconductors.” That makes Ouster’s products “digital lidars,” according to Pacala.

Ouster’s competitors, including Velodyne and Waymo, deploy hundreds of off-the-shelf discrete components to make their spinning lidars work. In contrast, Ouster has developed tightly integrated custom vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) and another ASIC that incorporates single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) arrays.

Ouster’s platform also includes Xilinx’s FPGA, responsible for processing massive amount of data.

This is essentially the same digital lidar architecture — VCSEL and SPAD arrays — Apple used for its iPad Pro 11, explained Pacala.

Alexis Debray, technology and market analyst at Yole Développement, told EE Times that while Waymo’s real-world testing experience in autonomous vehicles would likely advantage its lidar in the automotive market, Waymo lacks experience in serving hundreds of different clients in the industrial market. In Debray’s view, the key to winning multiple markets is to offer “many models” and “customization.”  “For example, Ouster offers around 50 different models, all based on the same technology but with various ranges, fields of view, and resolutions,” Debray observed… Full story