Apple needs revolutionary LiDAR sensors for self-driving cars

Apple has held preliminary discussions with four unnamed suppliers of LiDAR sensors for self-driving vehicles, Reuters reported Wednesday. That might indicate that the Cupertino giant has rebooted its self-driving hardware, code-named Project Titan, although these sensors could also be for the vehicles used in the company’s in-house shuttle service for employees.

Reuters has the story:

Apple is seeking LiDAR units that would be smaller, cheaper and more easily mass produced than current technology. The iPhone maker is setting a high bar with demands for a ‘revolutionary design,’ one of the people familiar with the talks said.

While Tim Cook & Co. are evaluating the companies’ technology, they’re also continuing work on Apple’s own LiDAR unit, three sources said. One of the sources speculated that the sensor effort means Apple is doubling down on autonomous driving hardware.

What is clear from Apple’s interest in cheaper LiDAR systems is that it wants to control the ‘perception stack’ of sensors, computers and software to drive an autonomous vehicle, regardless of who makes the vehicle, another person familiar with the talks said.

Apple wants a “design-oriented” sensor that would see several hundred meters down the road and be unobtrusive enough to fit into the overall lines of a vehicle.

Apple gets ‘a lot of optionality by working on the perception stack,’ said the second person familiar with the talks. ‘Bringing a passenger car to the market is really, really hard, and there’s no reason right now they need to jump into it.’

LiDAR is a method of measuring distance to a target by illuminating the target with pulsed laser light and measuring the reflected pulses with a sensor. Differences in laser return times and wavelengths can then be used to make an object’s digital 3D representations.

LiDAR sensors play a crucial part in autonomous driving technologies. Reuters alleges that Apple needs sensors that can provide a detailed three-dimensional look at the road.

Current LiDARs, costing north of $100,000, are too bulky and prone to failure because the system requires mechanical parts to sweep the laser scanners across the road.