Quanergy's S3 LiDAR to Transform Autonomous Car Manufacturing

By CIOReview | Thursday, January 21, 2016

SUNNYVALE, CA: Quanergy, a company specialized in LiDAR sensing technology has recently publicized the S3 solid-state LiDAR system designed to bring versatile, comprehensive, and affordable sensing to autonomous cars, at CES 2016. The S3 variant is small, and costs around 250 dollars or less when produced in large volume (of around 100,000 units). S3 LiDAR acts as a key component for driverless cars.

S3 LiDAR creates a real-time long-range 3D view of the environment and provides the ability to recognize objects. S3 LiDAR systems work by firing laser pulses out into the world and then receive the reflected ray after it encounters an obstacle. It calculates the time period between outgoing and incoming pulses and measures the distance of the obstacle from the source. Tracking the direction of laser, the LiDAR gets all the data required, to arrange them in 3D space.

The solid-state technology is the backbone of S3 LiDAR; it has no moving parts, not even micro mirrors. Quanergy’s LiDAR uses an optical phased array as a transmitter, which can steer pulses of light by shifting the phase of a laser pulse.

Quanergy joined hands with Mercedes-Benz in 2014 to develop, test and deploy advanced LiDAR-based systems for autonomous cars, and has demonstrated it at CES 2016. “Quanergy’s innovative technology has created a low-cost, robust sensor that delivers a performance aligned with our expectations. We look forward to working together with Quanergy on the future of autonomous driving,” says Axel Gern, VP of Autonomous Driving, Mercedes-Benz Research and Development, North America.

S3 LiDAR will be publically available next year as Quanergy is still working on alpha stage of this project. 3D mapping of its LiDAR systems has seen many updates this year, and now Intel, Google and Lenovo are leveraging this for some of their products.

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