Page 55 - Vayyar in the News 1

might break the guy’s neck. Better to hold back that release until the crash has begun, when the guy may find himself in a bag-safe zone.
The second question is—why use radar instead of cameras? The answer, Melamed says, is fourfold. It will (he promises) cost less than the several thousand dollars you need for a high-performance stereo camera; it can take in the entire cabin, not just focus on a particular seat; it can see through things that would block a camera’s view; and it doesn’t give details of people’s faces, and so can’t invade their privacy.
Radar can penetrate seats, people, and a blanket thrown over a baby that might be sleeping in the car seat. It can even detect the baby’s breathing. Not leaving a baby behind by mistake is one of the things future regulators are going to insist upon.
Of course, radar can’t penetrate everything. I asked Melamed how the system handles beams reflected off the metal sides. He admits that it isn’t easy, but says Vayyar has developed algorithms to “nullify” those reflections. “Today, we are the best at that,” he asserts.
But the metal problem is why the company doesn’t attempt to use the in-cabin chip to sense the environment outside the car. To do that, another chip, exactly like the one used inside the car, could be placed on the door or at the front. Thus placed, it could look as far as 100 meters away, producing a point cloud that would compete against lidar. True, lidar would still be the more accurate sensor, but Vayyar’s radar would still beat it in bad weather. But that outside-the-car project’s on the back burner, for now.
The company has forged partnerships with the auto suppliers Brose, based in Coburg, Germany; Valeo, based in Paris, and Faurecia, based near Paris. It’s just one more example of how radar is striking back at sexier sensors. Proponents of radar say it’s unfair to pit new sensors against existing radar sets that were never really optimized for use in cars. There’s plenty of room for improvement there, they claim. A number of startups are chasing it.
One company, called Lunewave, builds a spherical radar antenna that can transmit and receive beams from all directions. It’s based on ideas that date back to the 1940s but were never economical enough or compact enough for automotive applications until Lunewave began using 3D printing to craft its intricately structured sphere. Researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration, in Berlin, are working on a combined camera-radar system called KameRad. The system processes the data in the sensor itself so that it can send a command, such as “stop now,” straight to the car, bypassing other processors. That could shave life-saving milliseconds off the response time.
From the beginning, some designers of self-driving cars have preferred radar and cameras to lidars. Elon Musk is the most famous lidar-basher, but even mighty Mercedes-Benz chose radar as the fundamental sensor for Bertha, its original self-driving prototype. Old technologies don’t necessarily die. And if they’re constantly changing, they’re not even old.