According to the “Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2019” autonomous driving Technology has stepped into “Through of Disillusionment “phase. Let’s go back to 2014, this technology was only given publicity and still lacked concrete commercial feasibility proof, which we called it in the “Technology Trigger “phase. After five years, we see progress in this technology and most of the big automotive and high-techs companies continue to make lots of investment without hesitating.
Autonomous cars are implemented through at least three steps: sensing, understanding and action. For sensing the car’s surrounding environment, we need to equip the car with a variety of sensors like Lidars, camera or radar. As shown in below figure, compared to the camera or radar, although Lidar is costly and its capability of environment recognition may not be the best, but the distance (Z-axis) measurement capability of Lidar is not only direct but wide-ranged and be better than the other two surely.
For eyeing the Lidar’s market intelligence and patent portfolios of these well-known start-ups and big companies, we built a dedicated expert team years ago. Recently, we found that we have accumulated rich data and analysis and it’s a right time to share our observations and insights with everyone in the next few months. We hope our data analysis will be helpful to professionals who are interested in this topic.
