Cruise Obtained Strobe to Greatly Reduce LiDAR's costs.

Cruise, the autonomous car startup GM bought last year, has also acquired a startup under it brand – Strobe, a LiDAR sensor maker that decreases an entire LiDAR array down to just one chip, which Cruise says will be helpful in cost reduction of LiDAR on a per vehicle basis by almost 100%.

The cost case is a huge one: LiDAR remains one of the single most expensive components in the self-driving vehicle stack, and it’s a bottleneck not only in terms of cost of production, but also in terms of complexity of manufacturing, performance and reliability over time in different types of weather conditions, Cruise CEO; Kyle Vogt stated in a Medium post announcing the news.

Vogt made it known that cost reduction for autonomous vehicles will be the key in deploying them across a wide range of different areas, including in the suburbs and outside of major cities, where currently the economics would make it difficult to deploy something like self-driven hailing service.

Strobe’s LiDAR component

 Strobe’s technology provides precise calculations of both distance and velocity, Vogt says, and combined with radar, can also make available info vital to decision-making for autonomous cars. Strobe plans to bring its team and founders to Cruise, and Cruise will work with both its new engineers and with GM technologies and resources to develop LiDAR tech along with GM’s Hughes Research Labs skunkworks team.

Velodyne is currently the industry leader in terms of LiDAR employed in self-driving vehicle technology, but many are trying to cut-down the cost, form factor and reliability of LiDAR parts. Recently, a different startup, Luminar made-known the method of its own operation, and it’s also revealed that it’s working with Toyota Research Institute along with other selected partners to add its abilities to autonomous test vehicles on the road.