Innoviz Launches New 360 Degree Lidar Sensor

Israeli-startup Innoviz is widely viewed as one of the leaders in the emerging market for automotive lidar sensors. The company was one of the first to develop a sensor that used a micro-electromechanical-system (MEMS) based sensor and its first volume commercial product is due to launch with BMW later this year, most likely on the new 7 series. While the InnovizOne is going through the final stages of its validation process, the company has already been hard at work on next generation sensors including the lower-cost InnovizTwo and the new Innoviz360 that is being announced at CES 2022. 

The first generation of automotive lidar sensors such as those developed by Velodyne were all rotating devices. They used a vertical array of laser emitters with a parallel array of photodetectors to capture the reflected photons. The whole system was mounted on a turntable that spins as the vehicle moves down the road. Each row of pulses in the point cloud that was generated came from an individual laser. 

The Velodyne HDL-64 which looked like a spinning bucket and which was widely used for most early automated vehicle development had 64 lasers and detectors and cost nearly $80,000. As such a complex device, subjected to the vibration and environmental conditions on the roof of a car, it was fine for R&D but lacked the durability for production applications. 

Sensors like those developed by Innoviz use a microscopic MEMS mirror mechanism produced on a chip to steer a single laser beam as it scans back and forth across the field of view. Numerous lidar companies including Aeye and Robosense use MEMS to steer their laser beams. The InnovizOne that BMW is going to use has four lasers, detectors and MEMS units. The new InnovizTwo that is slated to debut in 2023 reduces that to one each which is claimed to help reduce the cost by 70%. 

One of the limitations of MEMS lidars until now is that they couldn’t do 360 degree scanning. Most have just a 120 degree horizontal field of view and would require three to four sensors for full surround scanning. The new Innoviz360 uses most of the hardware advances from the new InnovizTwo including the new single laser, detector and custom processing chip but configured with a different beam steering system. 

Rather than just the MEMS that steers the beam in both the horizontal and vertical directions, the 360 adds a rotating mirror. A hybrid beam steering system handles the vertical adjustment that then bounces off the mirror. Other rotating sensors have the mass of the laser array, detectors and optics all on the turntable. This extra mass adds friction, cost and impacts durability. With only a mirror on the Innoviz360 turntable, there is substantially less mass and both cost and durability are claimed to be significantly improved. 

Another limitation of traditional spinning lidar sensors is inability to adjust the angular resolution and point density. MEMS lidars can have dynamic scanning patterns that put much higher point density in regions of interest such as near the road horizon. The region of interest can also be adjusted to compensate for road grade or vehicle pitch during acceleration or braking. Innoviz claims angular resolution of as low as 0.05 degrees, one of the smallest in the industry which allows the sensor to create point clouds that appear almost as photographic. This enables the perception system to classify objects detected to complement and cross check the classification coming from cameras. 

Samples of the Innoviz360 are expected to be available by the end of 2022 and volume production is planned for 2024.