At the upcoming CES 2021 tradeshow, GreatStar OLEI will introduce what it claims is the first industrial quality mini-lidar designed for navigation and obstacle avoidance in robotics and industrial applications.
The lidar system is compact, durable and lightweight. Priced at about $500 per unit, the system was designed using German laser drivers and motors, Japanese sensor technology and other components from global manufacturers and it was manufactured in China.
GreatStar said that lidar in vehicles become commercially available when the cost of the devices was reduced. The same trend is now happening with lidar in other use cases such as robotics and industrial applications.
The company said that commercial-grade lidar typically accounted for more than 20% to 30% of overall costs, limiting mass production and adoption of many advanced, sensor-based applications due to the high cost. GreatStar believes this mini-lidar solution will open new avenues for developers to include the technology in future and current designs.
Lidar is a remote sensing method used to measure the distances of objects — rocks, a dog in the street, walls inside a building, curves in the road, the size of packages and more. Much like radar systems that employ radio waves to measure objects, lidar uses lasers to calculate the distance of objects and the light pulses from these lasers generate 3D information about those objects.
CES 2021 will be all-digital and takes place Jan. 11-14.
