AEye unveils 4Sight, a breakthrough LiDAR sensor that delivers automotive solid-state reliability and record-breaking performance

AEye, Inc, an artificial perception pioneer today announced 4Sight, a groundbreaking new sensor family built on its unique iDAR platform. 4Sight redefines LiDAR performance while establishing a benchmark for the next generation of LiDAR sensors and intelligent robotic vision systems. Debunking previous assumptions that high performing long-range 1550nm LiDAR could not achieve both solid state reliability and lower cost, 4Sight delivers on all three – performance, reliability and price.

The first 4Sight sensor to be released in July is the 4Sight M. The 4Sight M is designed to meet the diverse range of performance and functional requirements to power autonomous and partially automated applications. 4Sight family of sensors has been developed and tested over the last 18 months in conjunction with a wide range of customers and integrators in automotive, trucking, transit, construction, rail, intelligent traffic systems (ITS), aerospace and defense markets. 4Sight leverages the complete iDAR software platform, which incorporates an upgraded visualizer (which allows you to model various shot patterns) and a comprehensive SDK so it is fully extensible and customizable.

“The primary issue that has delayed broad adoption of LiDAR has been the industry's inability to produce a high-performance deterministic sensor with solid state reliability at a reasonable cost,” said Blair LaCorte, President of AEye. “We created a more intelligent, agile sensor that is software definable to meet the unique needs of any application – the result is 4Sight.”

Some of the unique features of the 4Sight M are:

LiDAR Performance

-Software definable range optimization of up to 1,000 meters (eye- and camera-safe)

-Up to 4 million points per second with horizontal and vertical resolution less than 0.1°

-Instantaneous addressable resolution of 0.025°

Integrated Intelligence

-Library of functionally-safe deterministic scan patterns that can be customized and fixed or triggered to adjust to changing environments (highway, urban, weather, etc.)

-Integrated automotive camera, boresight aligned with AEye's agile LiDAR – instantaneously generating true color point clouds. Parallel camera-only feed can provide -cost-effective redundant camera sensor.

-Enhanced ground plane detection to determine topology at extended ranges

Advanced Vision Capabilities

-Detection and classification of objects with advanced perception features such as intraframe radial and lateral velocity

-Detection through foliage and adverse weather conditions such as rain and fog through the use of dynamic range, full-waveform processing of multiple returns

-Detection of pedestrians at over 200 meters

-Detection of small, low reflective objects such tire fragments, bricks or other road debris (10x50cm at 10% reflectivity) at ranges of over 120 meters

Reliability

-Shock and Vibration – designed and tested for solid-state performance and reliability. 4Sight has proven in third-party testing to sustain mechanical shock of over 50G, random vibration over 12Grms (5-2000Hz), and sustained vibration of over 3G for each axis.

Automotive-grade production:

-Automotive-qualified supply chain utilizing standard production processes and overseen by global manufacturing partners

-Designed for manufacturability using a simple solid-state architecture consisting of only 1 scanner, 1 laser, 1 receiver, and 1 SoC

-Common hardware architecture and software/data structures across all fully autonomous to partially automated applications (ADAS) – leveraging R&D and economies of scale

In addition to setting new standards for performance, reliability and price, the 4Sight M is also extremely power efficient. 4Sight's groundbreaking system attributes such as time-to-detect, agile scanning, shot energy optimization, power optimization of returns, and boresight camera/LiDAR data generation, greatly reduces the processing and bandwidth typically required for full perception stacks. When implemented in a vehicle, AEye's expects 4Sight sensors to be nearly power neutral in relation to a vehicle's perception stack power budget.