WiMi Hologram Cloud Inc (WIMI)

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Lidar "slaps the face" Musk, Luminar/Wishi Image/WIMI Hologram, etc. are about to rise.

source
https://min.news/en/auto/20dd2d39fded93b1add275de04f51996.html

2022-03-16 07:34 HKT

As the head of the most successful autonomous driving company Tesla, Musk has questioned the lidar-led autopilot technology many times on different occasions, but this has not stopped the strong rise of lidar worldwide, except for Tesla. All car manufacturers and technology companies outside Lara are developing lidar technology!

With the release of NIO ET7, ET5 and Xiaopeng P5 with L3-level autonomous driving capabilities, the Huawei Extreme Fox Alpha S, which meets L2-L4 level, was also released in April 21, and the industry began to enter the era of L3+ autonomous driving.

The global autonomous driving market is expected to usher in a period of rapid growth. According to IDC, the global shipments of self-driving passenger vehicles are expected to increase from 27.74 million in 2020 to 54.25 million in 2024, of which the shipments of L3 and above autonomous vehicles will increase from 32,000 in 2020. To 863,000 vehicles in 2024, the CAGR in 20-24 is as high as 128%.

The two paths of autonomous driving have the same goal, and jointly promote the accelerated landing of high-level autonomous driving.
Currently autonomous driving is coming towards us along two paths:
- One is a progressive development path led by new car-making forces and followed closely by traditional car companies, gradually realizing L3+ autonomous driving from Advanced Assisted Driving (ADAS);
- the other is a technological force represented by Baidu, Google, etc. Take a leap-forward technological development route and directly develop L4/L5 level autonomous driving/unmanned driving.

Although the development paths are different, with the help of technology companies, new car manufacturers, traditional car companies and other forces, autonomous driving hardware and software technologies have become more and more mature, which together point to the implementation of high-level autonomous driving.

Automotive LiDAR is becoming the next hot spot in the field of intelligent vehicles.
Lidar's ability to map the environment and measure the speed of objects makes it a great addition to partially or fully autonomous vehicles, and is unique in that it provides a long and wide field of view.
"Humans don't have lidars, but they can still drive." Musk tried to justify Tesla's self-driving software algorithm, which is capable of autonomous driving based on vision.
However, as costs drop and the technology continues to improve, LiDAR is being favored by more and more automakers.

Apple, which has attracted great attention from the automotive industry, also has considerable accumulation in the field of lidar. Therefore, some analysts in the industry pointed out that Apple's car-building plan has a stimulating effect on radar concept stocks. Looking at the current status of autonomous driving technology, vehicle environment perception technology can be roughly divided into two categories. In addition to lidar, there is also the camera visual recognition route that Tesla is insisting on.

Previously, many opinions from the outside world believed that because lidar is still in the experimental stage and the cost is high, Tesla's visual route is already at the leading level among the mass-produced cars of various car companies, and the importance of lidar to autonomous driving was once seen. Low.

It can be said that lidar makes up for the shortcomings of other sensors and can be practically applied to autonomous driving, providing great assistance to car companies and companies that want to enter the automotive field, and can also play an extremely important role in the further development of unmanned driving. important role. For example, for small obstacles at a distance, the angular resolution of millimeter-wave radar is not enough, and the camera is not enough to recognize general obstacles at the far end; The jamming can be confirmed, and the lidar can confirm the jamming in 2-3 frames due to its precise angle measurement capability and contour measurement capability, and make a judgment within 100 milliseconds.

As car companies bet on the field of autonomous driving, higher-level driverless vehicles will inevitably face more complex scenarios, road conditions, and higher requirements for discrimination, computing power requirements, etc. Many experts believe that lidar is the future high-end An indispensable system in autonomous driving. At present, there are more than 150 lidar manufacturers in the world, and a large number of companies and products, including Velodyne, Luminar, Wei Shi Imaging and WIMI, have been listed recently.

The latest statistics show that as of January this year, 17 automakers around the world have launched a total of 21 passenger models equipped with lidar, some of which have already been put into production and some are about to go on sale.

In January of this year, Mercedes-Benz announced that it was working with Luminar (LAZR.US) , planning to integrate lidar technology into production vehicles that are about to go into production; in mid-2021, Luminar reached a similar agreement with Volvo. Velodyne Lidar (VLDR.US) has always been committed to promoting the commercial application of next-generation automation solutions based on Velodyne LiDAR sensors and software. In the AwV project, Velodyne has cooperated extensively with brands such as NVIDIA and Siemens to leverage LiDAR in the A key role in driving safety and efficiency. Dimension Vision (MVIS.US) announced the completion of the development of the long-range lidar sensor A-Sample and its manufacturing platform.

It is reported that WIMI Hologram (WIMI.US), the representative company of global holographic AI vision, is also closely following it in the field of lidar. At the same time, it has also developed 3D holographic pulsed lidar products, which have been approved by the Federal Communications Commission to enter the US market.

According to public information, WIMI focuses on holographic cloud services, mainly focusing on automotive AR holographic HUD, 3D holographic pulse LiDAR, head-mounted light field holographic equipment, holographic semiconductor, holographic cloud software, holographic car navigation and other professional fields, covering from holographic Vehicle AR technology, 3D holographic pulse LiDAR technology, holographic vision semiconductor technology, holographic software development, holographic AR advertising technology, holographic AR entertainment technology, holographic ARSDK payment, interactive holographic communication and other aspects of holographic AR technology, is a holographic cloud comprehensive technical solution provider.

In the lidar race, China is leading the way. According to statistics from Bloomberg Financial Information, 70% of the models that have and will be equipped with lidars are from Chinese automakers, mainly electric models. Lidar may appear first on high-end models, but eventually the most popular models on the market will also have the feature.

According to the agency's forecast, the scale of China's domestic lidar market will rapidly increase from 5 billion yuan to nearly 40 billion yuan in the next five years. By 2025, the global lidar market is expected to rise from the current US$15 billion to 100 billion.
The above indications show that 2022 must not be the "start of lidar being abandoned", but may be the "full explosion year of lidar".