Baraja, the developer of its Spectrum-Scan lidar technology for autonomous vehicles, and Tier IV, an open-source autonomous driving company, have announced a new collaboration to research and develop a software-defined sensor suite combining lidar and HDR cameras.
The suite will bring together Baraja’s lidar technology with Tier IV’s sensor fusion software and HD cameras, creating a perception solution designed to provide optimal performance in the widest possible range of situations and environments for autonomous vehicles. The two companies say they will collaborate on building a reference unit that will form the basis of future commercial product opportunities with automotive OEMs.
The automotive-grade HDR cameras — which provide high dynamic range, LED flicker mitigation and onboard lens distortion correction — provide a 2D representation of the scene, while lidar provides a 3D point cloud that enables greater density of data. Together with Tier IV’s sensor fusion software, the resulting data should provide an accurate representation of the physical world for automotive perception algorithms that will enable autonomous vehicles to make better decisions, faster in real time.
“We are excited to work with Tier IV as we embark on this journey to enable true autonomous vehicle technology for consumers,” said Federico Collarte, founder and CEO of Baraja.” With this combined solution, we’ll be able to provide a dynamic and configurable feature system that can be adopted by a broader range of vehicles as they move to Level 2+ autonomy and beyond.”