- I wanted to check back with Velodyne to see if there was any news.
- Velodyne is teaming with GrayMatter to offer a trial version of its visualization point cloud software.
- Is the mobile mapping community going to be interested in this technology?
I thought I would check in at Velodyne to see if there was any news concerning the 64E. I reported on this in one of my first posts. Velodyne is actually an acoustics company – they build subwoofers. Somehow they got interested in the DARPA challenge, which led them to building a laser scanner so that they could navigate their autonomous vehicle in real time. Turns out there was more interest in their scanner than their vehicle technology.
In order to collect the scenery that they needed to avoid collisions they decided to arrange 2 layers of 32 lasers in a circle, one on top of the other and then rotate them at 15HZ. This results in a data collection rate of 1.3 million points per second with a stated accuracy of approximately 1 inch – certainly adequate for many real time applications, including autonomous vehicle navigation. This is 3D video without using FLASH.
The most recent news from Velodyne is that they are teaming with a software company to offer point cloud processing for visualization purposes. GrayMatter AVS is an autonomous vehicle visualization and navigation software. Velodyne will be supplying a trial version with all of their 64E S2 shipments.
I have not seen or heard any interest from the mobile mapping community in this unit. I thought the price was reasonable. I was told that Google had been evaluating this unit. Check out the image in this spec sheet to better understand how it works.
This post was written by Gene V. Roe
