Ouster’s new color lidar is coming to replace cameras

The tech industry has spent the last decade questioning whether self-driving cars need lidar sensors, cameras, or all of the above. Lidar company Ouster says it has a new answer: it put both in the same sensor.

On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced a new line of lidar sensors it calls “Rev8,” all of which offer what it calls “native color coverage.” These sensors are able to capture a color image and three-dimensional depth information at the same time, performing the function of two sensors in one place.

Ouster CEO Angus Pacala said the development has been a decade in the making at his company, and he wasn’t shy about his ambitions for the new product line in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, calling it “the holy grail of what a roboticist has been looking for.”

“Throughout human history, it’s been this: you buy a lidar sensor, you buy a camera, and you try to make sense of integration and high-level thinking, and you spend a lot of time doing this,” he told TechCrunch. “And companies are only getting in the middle in terms of measuring and integrating data streams.”

Ouster’s new sensors, he said, change this equation.

“The goal is to cover the cameras. There’s no reason one sensor can’t do both,” he said.

The Rev8 range comes at a changing time for lidar companies. There was a wave of consolidation that lasted for years, when Ouster bought Velodyne, and Luminar’s assets were recently acquired from bankruptcy.

At the same time, the sensor market is exploding. Waymo and others have finally installed robots that work and are scaling quickly. Robot companies – humanoid and industrial – are raising investment dollars and need sensors to see the world. There is so much interest in the space that new companies like Boston-based Teradar are popping up and testing the waters in entirely new ways. (In the case of Teradar, terahertz imaging is used.)

A color shutter that combines depth-of-focus information with camera-quality image data can be especially valuable for robotics players, Pacala said. And he said Ouster worked with Fujifilm and imaging science company DXOMARK to understand “what it means to build a good camera.”

In fact, Pacala says Ouster’s color shutter is “a huge improvement on a modern camera” because of the way the company already designs and builds its sensors.

Ouster uses so-called “digital lidar” structures. Instead of an analog approach, which involves many moving parts, Ouster captures the lidar data directly on its custom chip using what is known as a single photon avalanche diode (SPAD).

The company uses this SPAD technology to capture color image data on the Rev8 sensors. Pacala said that this novel method allows its image capture to be more sensitive than a conventional camera.

“It’s 48-bit color, 116 dB of variable width, like mega pixel resolution. These are top line numbers that make a good camera pound. But it just so happens that it comes as a previous data stream as a point cloud with 3D colors,” he said. “You can actually use the data as a camera stream as well, but that’s the power of this system, that you can just use the lidar data stream, you can just use the camera data stream, or you can use the premixed data stream, depending on what kind of forward thinking your vision team is.”

Pacala said his company has sent samples to existing customers and is now taking orders. He said he’s very proud of the OS1 Max sensor, which he considers “the industry’s best sensor.” It can see 500 meters in all directions and is smaller than the other long range hood by a “huge margin.”

“We had a long LiDAR range, but it wasn’t like a clear cut above everything else,” he said. “That’s a big jump for Ouster. I think it means we’re going to start seeing more of it in high-speed robotics, robotics applications, I think a lot of drone stuff is going to transition to OS1 Max.”

Other new lidars built on the Rev8 platform will include OS0, OS1, and OSDome, according to a press release.

Ouster is not the only company that started talking about color lidar. Last month, the Chinese company Hesai announced its color lidar platform which it says will go into mass production by the end of this year. Some companies, like Innoviz, have pitched their own “color lidar.”

Pacala says that most other players who try to “bundle” cameras and lidar sensors are actually packing them together in a box. The approach Ouster (and, if applicable, Hesai) is taking is to put lidar and imaging tech on the same chip.

This greatly reduces the amount of work Ouster customers have to do to make sense of the sensor competition, Pacala said, and sets those customers up to end up with completely biased cameras — all cheaper and smaller than previous Ouster technology.

“This is fundamentally changing the value proposition of what we’re selling to the customer from this stage forward,” he told TechCrunch.