By Sabbir Rangwala
IoT or the Internet of Things has been widely deployed in the past decade as sensors became smarter, machine learning proliferated and advanced, access to WiFi, Bluetooth and other wireless communications became prevalent, and cloud storage and computing technologies matured. In general, IoT achieved intelligent networking of “things” that were typically static or stationary, through movement of data. The ongoing and imminent revolution is in the Autonomy of Things or AoT — which for purposes of this article is defined as autonomous movement of “things” or robots, either in public (mostly uncontrolled), semi-public (somewhat controlled, includes outer space) or private (highly controlled) spaces.
The most publicized examples of AoT are autonomous vehicles and trucks (AVs), and the role and necessity of LiDAR for enabling this application in public spaces has been reported extensively. The focus of the current article is to examine how LiDAR impacts AoT in other applications like construction, logistics, mining, manufacturing, agriculture, medicine and gaming. In these cases, the primary role of LiDAR is to enable perception for moving things — robotic arms, robots, machines, industrial equipment, tools, etc. Unlike AVs where the primary function of the LiDAR is to provide a unique perception modality to enable safe operation, these other applications have productivity, efficiency and precision positioning/guidance as their primary goals (Table 1). LiDAR enables these goals by providing 3D sensing of various objects or things in the environment. Gaming is slightly different in that the LiDAR senses the human body to adjust and cue the gamer — in this case, the “thing” is a human!
Over 75 LiDAR companies exist today, with at least $4B in equity funding. Six companies have gone public via SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies) mergers and command a market valuation of ~$14B. Additional captive LiDAR efforts exist within automotive Tier 1s (ZF, Valeo, Continental) and technology companies like Waymo, Aurora, Argo and Yandex. In general, these companies are focused on the AV and ADAS markets. However, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently admitted — AVs are a hard nut to crack (and this from a guy who wants to go to Mars!) because it needs to deploy in a public space, with significant levels of government regulation and human indiscipline — the safety thresholds are hard to achieve and convince customers, insurers and regulators about.
Most robotics and LiDAR companies are also focusing on near term applications of AoT — primarily in private or semi-public environments, where public safety is not the paramount concern, and regulatory and consumer acceptance hurdles are lower. The business model relies on a sale to a service business that can use AoT to address immediate problems of trained worker scarcity, worker safety, inhospitable working environments, higher productivity, lower costs, manufacturing precision and quality. The challenge in these cases is to ensure that performance is consistent with the application and pricing at lower volumes — generally, automotive requirements are much more demanding in some dimensions, and simply retrofitting an AV LiDAR to non-AV applications may not be practical in all cases. For example, since these applications typically involve things moving at lower speeds, long range and high detection speed may not be critical — on the other hand, angular and depth resolution may be very important.
A great example of AoT that is currently operational is mining, which occurs in harsh terrains and environments. Caterpillar understands the benefits of autonomy — higher productivity, higher levels of worker safety and lower costs. They made significant investments in providing autonomous equipment to their customers, ranging from drilling equipment to 600 ton haul trucks which have moved ~5 trillion pounds of material to date. These efforts paid off handsomely during the Covid crisis of 2020–2021 where trained worker supply was in short supply. Caterpillar customers were able to still continue their operations with close to full capacity. The LiDAR which was custom designed to meet harsh terrain, environmental and visibility conditions provides situational awareness and obstacle detection, as well as terrain mapping to plan tool movement.