Skip to main content

Lidar technology wins big in China’s autonomous vehicle challenge

China’s fifth annual Future Challenge earlier this month pitted eleven unmanned intelligent vehicles against each other on a course designed to test their capabilities in suburban and urban road tests, over a 23-kilometre course. All of the first eight cars to finish were equipped with Velodyne’s 3D Lidar vision technology which provides active sensing for crash avoidance, driving automation and mobile road survey and mapping. Velodyne HDL-64E and HDL-32E sensors deliver 360-degree views of the car’s env
November 26, 2013 Read time: 2 mins
China’s fifth annual Future Challenge earlier this month pitted eleven unmanned intelligent vehicles against each other on a course designed to test their capabilities in suburban and urban road tests, over a 23-kilometre course.

All of the first eight cars to finish were equipped with Velodyne’s 3D Lidar vision technology which provides active sensing for crash avoidance, driving automation and mobile road survey and mapping. Velodyne HDL-64E and HDL-32E sensors deliver 360-degree views of the car’s environment, with real-time updates twenty times per second.

Cars on the course needed to demonstrate the ability to recognise light, eliminate human and vehicle interference, successfully detour around construction zones, turn around and come to a stop. All were also required to establish the ability to make a U-turn, accelerate and decelerate. Performance was graded on safety, smartness, smoothness and speed.

"This is simply a remarkable accomplishment," said Wolfgang Juchmann, PhD, 2259 Velodyne Lidar director of sales and marketing. "The Future Challenge course was nothing less than demanding throughout, with terrain and tests that demonstrated Lidar’s versatility and reliability in real time. And the fact that eight of eleven vehicles were so equipped stands as a huge vote of confidence in our technology."

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Open communication platform to support cooperative infrastructure
    July 23, 2012
    Within the European Commission's CVIS project, work is going on to shrink the open vehicle communication platform to make it more market-ready and to remove barriers to the creation of appropriate applications by those external to the project. Here, ERTICO's Zeljko Jeftic and Paul Kompfner and Q-Free's Knut Evensen discuss progress. Development of the open communication platform which will support the various applications developed by the European Commission's (EC's) Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Syste
  • Truck platooning trials take to the highways
    July 24, 2017
    There is rising enthusiasm in America and beyond for the concept of truck platooning with trials being planned in several US states, as David Crawford reports. Growing numbers of US states are considering or implementing plans for trials of electronically-linked truck platooning on public road networks. This is in response to the interest being shown by the US$70bn a year road freight industry, where fuel represents 41% of the operating costs making the prospect of improving fuel economy by trucks travellin
  • Truck platooning trials take to the highways
    July 24, 2017
    There is rising enthusiasm in America and beyond for the concept of truck platooning with trials being planned in several US states, as David Crawford reports. Growing numbers of US states are considering or implementing plans for trials of electronically-linked truck platooning on public road networks. This is in response to the interest being shown by the US$70bn a year road freight industry, where fuel represents 41% of the operating costs making the prospect of improving fuel economy by trucks travellin
  • Tollers make way as NextNav muscles into 902-928MHz spectrum
    July 30, 2013
    Toll operators and Progeny trade claim and counter claim about the potential ramifications of operating in the 902-928MHz spectrum, as Jon Masters finds out. Two months after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) determined that Progeny can start commercial operation of its NextNav location finding service, the dust has begun to settle. The tolling industry has had a chance to reflect on how this may impact its operations, in the knowledge that NextNav will share the 902-928MHz frequency band with RFI