The technology combines an “agile” Micro-optical Mechanical (MOEMS) LiDAR, pre-fused with a low-light camera and embedded artificial intelligence and thus is creating software-definable and extensible hardware that can dynamically adapt to real-time demands. iDAR promises to deliver higher accuracy and longer range than existing lidar designs, enabling improved autonomous vehicle safety and performance at a reduced cost.
According to AEye, a shortcoming of traditional LiDAR is that most systems oversample less important information like the sky, road and trees, or undersample critical information such as a fast-approaching vehicle. They then have to spend significant processing power and time extracting critical objects like pedestrians, cyclists, cars, and animals. AEye’s iDAR technology mimics how a human’s visual cortex focuses on and evaluates potential driving hazards: it uses a distributed architecture and at-the-edge processing to dynamically track targets and objects of interest, while always critically assessing general surroundings.
