Growing Lidar for North America

January 1, 2020

It’s pronounced eye-bay-oh, notes Paula Jones, the president of IBEO Automotive USA. She joined the lidar-technology company last June from thermoelectrics supplier Gentherm, where she was managing director. Jones aims to grow IBEO’s lidar business in North America as ADAS and self-driving vehicle applications take off in the 2020s. An industrial engineer, she was driver of Sunrunner, the University of Michigan’s first solar-powered race car, in the inaugural World Solar Challenge held in 1990.

“After that race in Australia, some of us on the team went out to the West Coast to work on EV technology. It was my entry into the mobility space,” she said during a conversation with Editor-in-Chief Lindsay Brooke in late 2019. Highlights from that interview:

What attracted you to IBEO?

Opportunity. It’s a startup technology company with great products and inroads into what’s next. I opened the office here in Detroit. Ibeo’s been around for 20 years; it was spun off from Sick, the industrial-laser maker based in Hamburg, Germany, where our headquarters is today. Our early lidar was prominent in the DARPA Challenges. It was the spinning-mirror type of sensor but then we took the path to solid-state lidar and the perception software behind it.

What is the company’s market differentiator?

Functional safety products developed to automotive grade. IBEO provided the core technology used in the first lidar from Valeo, that’s now in series production at Audi. To hit the industry’s targets for robustness and reliability, we believe solid-state lidar is the approach. The OEMs want to see a functional unit — they’ve seen so many PowerPoints from others. We understand how to design for redundancy and architect software that can be taken through all the testing loops. We have the experience and can show automotive-grade product.

Lidar costs are still too high for mainstream adoption. How quickly is that cost curve changing?

Solid-state technology allows us to manufacture our products on a board, on an SMT line [surface mount technology, a standard high-volume electronics manufacturing process]. That enables significant cost reduction. Ibeo’s next product will also have a modular feature where the electronics remain the same and depending on application — for example small FOV [field of vision] with long range, or a robotaxi side-mounting with wide FOV and short range.

With the modular design we can change the optics on the front of the sensor without changing the electronics. There is uncertainty about where the big volume will be.

Will lidar be commercially viable for ADAS applications as well as SAE Level 4/5?

Yes, for both. For Level 2+ and Level 3, depending on use cases, applications, the complexities in new electronic architectures and the rate of cost reduction. I think it’s going to be a case of fitting the sensor to what the ADAS feature is going to be. Safety is always the critical issue, of course, whether in robotaxis or passenger cars.

Lidar sensor performance is challenged by precipitation. What are IBEO engineers working on to solve that?

We’ve been able to do some ‘smart signaling’ with digital signal processing with the next solid-state product. It will enhance our ability to see through those situations, compared with that we have today.

What sort of timeframe is that next-gen lidar on?

We’re making B samples [late 2019], so 2022. That’s series production based on the level of validation required. Some use cases require significantly more validation, which will extend SOP a bit longer.

Where do you hope to be in a year?

To have grown the resources here in Detroit and on the West Coast to better serve customers. To have announced a collaboration with an OEM. And to have a strong revenue stream from our IBEO.ref reference system — a lidar-based development tool that’s used for sensor validation. Our relationship with ZF [which holds a 40% share in IBEO] is wonderful for the industrialization phase.