Velodyne Spins Ahead with New Lidar Contracts
Deals with Motional and May Mobility Follow Baidu Partnership
Velodyne landed two production contracts this week for its Alpha Prime lidar.
Motional
The more significant of the two, announced this morning, is a multi-year pact with Motional.
Velodyne will be the exclusive provider of long-range, 360° surround-view lidar for Motional’s Level 4 driverless vehicles.
As a reminder, Motional—a Hyundai/Aptiv joint venture—is partnering with Lyft on a robo-taxi service that’s due to launch in several U.S. cities in 2023.
May Mobility
(Image: May Mobility)
In addition, Velodyne inked a deal with Ann Arbor, Mich.-based May Mobility, which plans to equip its entire fleet with Velodyne’s Alpha Prime sensors.
May Mobility, which counts BMW and Toyota among its investors, has provided more than 265,000 self-driving rides since 2018—including a current pilot program in Grand Rapids, Mich. Deployments next year are planned in Arlington, Tex., and Higashi-Hiroshima City, Japan.
One More
The new deals follow an earlier one with Chinese tech giant Baidu, which will use Velodyne’s Alpha Prime modules in a variety of applications.
Significance
Velodyne, which pioneered automotive lidar with its spinning puck array for early prototype AVs, is facing increasing competition from dozens of new competitors and next-generation MEMS and FLASH lidar.
Veldodyne Apha Prime lidar (Image: Velodyne)
The new deals indicate Velodyne is up for the fight.
The company claims its Alpha Prime technology provides best-in-class perception, field-of-view, resolution, range and power efficiency.
“Velodyne’s sensors benefit from being tested and deployed by many customers across a wide variety of use cases and conditions,” says CEO Anand Gopalan. “The Alpha Prime is a part of many of the leading autonomous vehicle programs in the world.”
RELATED CONTENT
-
When Automated Production Turning is the Low-Cost Option
For the right parts, or families of parts, an automated CNC turning cell is simply the least expensive way to produce high-quality parts. Here’s why.
-
Ford Copies Nature
As Nature (yes, capital N Nature) has done a pretty good job of designing things, it is somewhat surprising that Man (ditto) doesn’t follow Nature’s lead more often when it comes to designing objects.
-
Jeeps Modified for Moab
On Easter morning in Moab, Utah, when the population of that exceedingly-hard-to-get-to town in one of the most beautiful settings on Earth has more than doubled, some people won’t be hunting for Easter eggs, but will be trying to get a good look at one of the vehicles six that Jeep has prepared for real-life, fast-feedback from the assembled at the annual Easter Jeep Safari.