Austin Russell helps cars see. As he drives past London's Hyde Park, he flicks between two screens - one showing what a standard autonomous car can see and the other showing what his car can see. Everything is visible, from the leaves on the trees and the people inside double-decker buses, to a man stamping out his cigarette on the side of the road. "For the first time, you can see in high resolution where objects are in the landscape," Russell says.
Russell is the 22-year-old founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies. He has recently pulled the California-based company out of stealth mode after five years building a Light Detecting and Ranging (LiDAR) system for self-driving cars. Russell started building his company, which now employs 200 people, before he was old enough to drive himself. Five years of secret development later, and Russell is finally ready to show the world his creation.
Russell describes his educational background as "non-traditional", a modest way of saying he was a boy genius. By age 12 he had been sponsored by Intel to build a supercomputer. At 13, he settled on pursuing optics and photonics, because, he says, "I wanted to see a product scale and be seriously deployed as something useful." At 18, he was bankrolled by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel so he could drop out of Stanford and begin building Luminar.
Read more: The UK is about to start testing self-driving truck platoons
LiDAR systems, which measure distance to objects with a pulsing laser light, have been around for decades, but most autonomous cars are still using the same hardware they were ten years ago. Russell says that's because developers have been "throwing software engineers at a hardware problem", which is why he decided to build everything from lasers to processors from scratch. His system operates at a new wavelength of light - 1,550 rather than 905 nanometres - so Russell says its range is ten times farther and its resolution 50 times higher than the most advanced systems.
This means it can see 200 metres ahead, giving the car seven seconds to react to an obstacle when travelling at standard speeds. Current LiDARs have to use a separate laser for each line of resolution ("normally you'd need 64 different lasers and receivers"), whereas Luminar's requires only one to create an almost 3D map. So, not only can it collect better data, but it's also far cheaper to make.
"We're aiming to help firms get dramatically fewer critical failures or disengagements," Russell says. "This is the first sensor to meet the minimum specifications our customers have requested. You can't send a car out and miss one in every 100 people."
Companies such as Ford and Uber have pledged to put autonomous cars on the road by 2021. Russell says that if they're going to be truly autonomous they'll need to be using his technology. So confident is he in Luminar, he says it can accelerate the arrival of fully automated cars by as much as five to ten years. How will those cars compare to today's? "We're possibly thousands of times better at seeing edge cases such as a child chasing after a ball," he adds. "Overall, when are those scenarios going to come up? Very rarely, but when they do, we'll be able to see them."
Updated 06.09.17: An earlier version of this article misstated the light wavelength as 1,150 and while Luminar has manufacturing facilities in Florida, their headquarters are in California
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
