Lidar maker's sensors auto-ready

ORLANDO — A thief provided the perfect circumstances for an inadvertent experiment.

Last summer, a pallet containing lidar sensors made by Luminar was stolen when the shipment arrived on a plane at Detroit Metro Airport. For the better part of a week, police and company officials searched for the missing sensors, finally tracing them to the depths of the nearby Grand River.

"Once the guy realized what he had, he freaked out and dumped them," said Austin Russell, Luminar's founder and CEO. "Funny thing was, they all actually worked after sitting down at the bottom for a week."

For Russell, the incident underscored the belief that the company's lidar units had achieved a level of automotive consistency and robustness that's often missing from the blueprints of so many Bay Area companies.

Unlike others, Luminar has focused on automotive readiness since its early days, integrating Toyota's kaizen manufacturing practices into its manufacturing facility in Orlando, where about 40 lidar sensors are made in a given week.

Now that the company is expanding its footprint here and planning to start series production of its latest product next year, its early emphasis on manufacturing fundamentals, Russell says, will help Luminar ramp up production from dozens of units in a given week to thousands.

That sort of scale is on the horizon. Luminar has partnerships with companies such as Volvo, Toyota and Volkswagen. Last year, the company had four launch partners. Russell says now there are more than 30 companies working with Luminar's development platforms. To date, the company has raised more than $250 million.

"It's the first time we've had something that meets not just performance requirements, but something that can scale to production and optimization for the product and meet the economic side for consumer vehicles," Russell said.

Next year, the company will begin producing its Iris sensing platform for use in advanced driver-assist systems and self-driving vehicles. That serves as a prelude to launches in consumer and commercial vehicles in 2022.

Iris adds perception software on top of the sensing platform itself, giving carmakers a turnkey way to distill information and insights from the sensors and integrate it into their self-driving systems. Melding software and hardware into one architecture and then putting it into production seems like a process that could easily go awry.

Earlier this year, Luminar hired Christoph Schroeder, a veteran of Bosch and Daimler, to serve as its vice president of software. At Bosch, he was part of a team that pioneered radar technology that has become a staple of driver-assist systems, and he helped oversee production as radar transitioned from hundreds of prototypes and scaled toward hundreds of thousands of units.

"The prototype is not the problem," Schroeder said. "The problem is making it work always. For a prototype, maybe you need 10 engineers. For the other, you need 100, not just to implement, but to test and document and make sure there is traceability, and to know why we do things. This will be out there for 15 years, and each car will have 200,000 miles on them. Every shortcut that you take will be exposed."

In its efforts to test and document, Luminar has 150 quality-control checkpoints set up throughout its manufacturing process in Orlando, which combines space for manufacturing and high-end research.

Its units are built from the chip level up. Subassembly lines for components such as laser transceivers and optical beds feed into a final assembly line. Once the units are complete, they're calibrated in one corner of the production floor, where white and gray tiles hang against a wall. The calibration ensures the lidar units provide returns with cameralike resolution, which is one reason why automakers say Luminar's lidar stands out in a crowded marketplace.

Out the back door of the facility, there are targets in a tree line across a field. Luminar uses those to ensure each lidar unit reaches its stated range of 200 meters. That's for today's development model; it will increase to 250 meters for the Iris.

"The most important thing is that the product we're shipping off the loading dock today meets the needs of the industry," said Jason Eichenholz, the company's chief technology officer. "The scale of what we're doing today blows people's minds. Our competition is trying to figure out how to catch up to where we were two years ago."