Lidar is the “secret sauce for connected vehicles and smart city adoption,” writes Cate Lawrence in a TNW story.

The article discusses how “lidar is not only about helping a vehicle feel and experience the road in real time, but also the communication between vehicles and other infrastructure like traffic monitoring.”

The article looks at applications like our Intelligent Infrastructure Solution, which provide “lidar-based traffic monitoring (that) can identify pedestrians approaching traffic lights, as well as bikes, and other road users in real time.”

To explain how the solution works, the article quotes Sinclair Vass, Chief Product Officer, saying:

“Let’s take a really bad intersection. Getting the traffic moving is also about safety, because as you track near misses, the software will literally know if this car passes this car within one second, five seconds, or 10 seconds. And you can see where an accident could potentially have occurred.”

The feature goes on to share how connected cars can reduce their “carbon footprint” by using Velarray H800 sensors which “consume less power than other lidar sensors in (their) class, extending the system operating range and reducing heat load.” To learn more about the sensor, go to the Velarray H800 product webpage.

The TNW story notes:

“The Velarray H800 typically consumes 13 W of energy, and a Luminar lidar — which typically consumes 25 W and is combined with a 30W back end unit — requires up to 55 W.”

This can result in major energy savings. The article shares a scenario that states the energy saved by using the Velarray “could power more than 165,000 average American households for a year.”

For a deeper dive on lidar and power consumption, check out this blog post: How Lidar Sensor Choices Can Impact Electric Vehicle (EV) Power Efficiency.

Interested in finding out more about the Intelligent Infrastructure Solution, take a look at this video.