Luminar Technologies' LiDAR Powered Driving Safety System

Over the last several years, the number of fatal car crashes has significantly risen in the US. Deadly vehicle accidents in the US rose by 16% from 2018 to 2022, with a total of 42,795 crashes in 2022, and this is without the consideration of unreported incidents.

Vehicle accidents are almost always caused by human error, leading to plenty of car accident prevention education constantly being run in the country, though educational programs haven’t been effective enough.

The rising severity of vehicle accidents calls for technological involvement, and this is what Luminar Technologies, a company founded by Forbes’ youngest billionaire CEO Austin Russell, brings into the field, with its vehicle safety and autonomy LiDAR technology.

Auto Accident Prevention

At some point in our time, seatbelts, airbags, and shatter-resistant glass were turning points for vehicle safety. However, with the known cause of auto accidents being human error most of the time, plenty of companies find more advanced collision avoidance technologies to be more than necessary.

ADAS, also known as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, are forms of digital technologies that, unlike fully self-driving cars like Waymo and Cruise’s robotaxis, help drivers experience more data-driven and safer driving.

ADAS utilize cameras, radar, and LiDAR for obstacle detection, and are aimed to minimize automotive accidents either passively, by providing visual, auditory, or haptic alerts to drivers during dangerous circumstances, or actively, with the vehicle taking action on its own. Active ADAS come in the form of automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, and lane-keeping assist, making vehicles semi-autonomous.

Many self-driving cars, like ones made by Tesla, are equipped with cameras that map a car’s environment and act similarly to other ADAS, by helping drivers autonomously switch lanes, for example. Unfortunately, Tesla’s “autopilot” features, which were developed with the goal of helping drivers and reducing auto accidents, ended up contributing to hundreds of crashes anyway.

Luminar finds existing technological solutions as ones heading in the right direction but are still imperfect and often unreliable, pushing the company to develop LiDAR-focused tech.

Safety and Autonomy with LiDAR

Believing in LiDAR as the ultimate form of technology for driving safety, Luminar incorporates its very own Iris™ LiDAR chip with perception software, HD mapping technology, and control and planning software to create its full-stack platform Sentinel™.

The company’s driving safety system, which in its entirety the company calls Proactive Safety™, takes ADAS to the next level, taking into account the inability of drivers to react in time in cases of emergencies or the existence of previously unknown obstacles, essentially acting as an extremely helpful backseat driver.

Luminar’s tech can provide precise data on three-dimensional sightings and objects at long distances of up to 250 meters in all lighting conditions, whether brightly blinding or dark at night. If a black car with minimal reflectivity were to be 150 meters away from a car equipped with Luminar’s tech, for example, the tech would allow the car to stray away and avoid it completely. By providing long-range sight, drivers have longer response time even at high speed.

Aside from objects, the tech also recognizes various road environments, such as pedestrians, lanes, free space, and road radiometry, taking confident, reliable, and proper action when or if necessary.

Luminar’s software and HD mapping tech enable data collection on real miles driven, meaning the more the car is driven, the more enhanced the car’s performance will be in terms of mapping and reacting to environments.

Helping Drivers

Whether applied to consumer cars or commercial trucks, Luminar’s tech isn’t meant to replace drivers completely but to simply step in during less-than-ideal conditions, by braking when needed or pulling over during a health emergency, for instance.

In cases of long commutes or road trips, which would understandably tire out drivers, Luminar’s LiDAR allows hands-off and eyes-off highway autonomy while still providing drivers resources for on-the-road anticipatory action.

Continuously improving its high-confidence detection technology, Luminar hopes to someday make its consumers’ vehicles entirely uncrashable, with an end goal of saving 100 million lives and 100 trillion hours over the next 100 years.

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