General Motors has just announced its purchase of Pasadena-based startup Strobe, a company that specializes in LiDAR technology.
The carmaker has provided few details about its acquisition of the company but Cruise Automation founder and chief executive Kyle Vogt says Strobe will allow GM to slash the cost of LiDAR and make them a reality on production cars.
“Our mission is to remove the driver from the vehicle and ultimately deploy these vehicles at massive scale. Lidar sensors have been one of the bottlenecks. The idea that lidar is too costly or exotic to use in a commercial product is now a thing of the past.”
According to Vogt, Strobe’s solutions for the problems with LiDAR will slash the costs of the expensive sensors by 99 per cent.
Strobe was founded in 2014 and while the company has stayed out of the limelight since its formation, Vogt has revealed that the tech company has designed a LiDAR sensor unit that can fit in your hand.
“It does allow us to collapse the entire sensor to a single chip. That removes almost all of the cost,” Vogt said.
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