Meet the boy genius changing the way driverless cars see

[Judi Lynn]

Austin Russell, the founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies, aims to improve the safety of autonomous cars with a single laser

By BONNIE CHRISTIAN
Monday 4 September 2017


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 Florida-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.

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 - 1,150 rather than 905 nanometres - so Russell says its range is ten times farther and its resolution 50 times higher than the most advanced systems.

More:
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/lidar-luminar-technologies-autonomous-cars-safety

[sharedvalues]

1. The whole industry is already using LIDAR

Check out Waymo and the lawsuit with Uber.

It's about alleged theft of Google s lidar technology and it's already a few years old.

[Thor_MN]

2. The article pretty much says that.

And building your own components from your own design is a good defense against spam patents.