Waymo, which recently launched its autonomous ride-hailing service in the Phoenix area, is betting big on traditional sensing technologies—including cameras, GPS, radar, and those super-expensive spinning lidar sensors on the roof.
These Waymo cars are essentially beta-testers, which means they are not fail safe. (Remember Uber?) If Waymo happens to have an accident and the fault is found to be with the sensor array, it’s a safe bet Waymo won’t be able to blame a blizzard or pea-soup fog.
An MIT spinoff startup called WaveSense hopes to hasten the arrival of autonomy in regions with, you know, weather, by providing an additional “leg” of the environmental perception stool that is utterly weatherproof: ground-penetrating radar (GPR). There are numerous applications for this technology in use today. Law enforcement locates buried booty or bodies with it, road commissions use it to assess road-bed fitness, it helps utilities locate pipes, and archaeologists rely on it to find the next King Tut’s tomb. Although most of these applications use a much lower-frequency radar than the forward-looking automotive kind—1–3 gigahertz (billion cycles per second) versus 77 GHz—WaveSense uses a frequency that’s way lower still—100–400 megahertz (million cycles per second).
The higher-frequency GPR provides super-high resolution but can’t measure as deep and suffers from “blur” at higher vehicle speeds. It’s also more susceptible to things like trash on a roadway, “thermal drift” as temperatures change, and the inevitable variation in the height of the sensor off the road that comes with vehicle pitch, roll, and payload variation. A 100–400-MHz system avoids these problems and can detect, record, and analyze underground features buried 6–10 feet deep. It also requires just 40 microwatts total, of which only 4 “leak” into the surrounding air. Higher-frequency GPR consume 1,000 times as much power. This radar senses differences in the electromagnetic properties of objects such as pipes, roots, and rocks in the surrounding dirt—all of which tend to be extremely stable over time.
As with camera- and lidar-based positional sensing, the road network must first be mapped by vehicles using essentially the same hardware, correlating GPR imagery with GPS location data. It takes a few passes to ensure the 5-foot-wide beam generates full coverage of a lane. The raw map data can be used for location-correlation, providing lateral/longitudinal accuracy within about an inch, and it works at highway speeds. Sensors that can “see” through 10 feet of dirt are unfazed by a layer of grunge on the lens, and at scale the sensor should cost $100 per vehicle. Another bonus: They mount underneath, so they don’t mar the vehicle’s styling.
WaveSense co-founder and CEO Tarik Bolat acknowledges the technology has some limitations. The radar does not work well in standing water, though deep snow is not a problem. The steel plates in bridges provide insufficient detail, so driving on them is GPR’s blinding “blizzard.” Happily, radar, lidar, and cameras should work fine on bridges, and autonomous cars won’t enter flooded areas. Frost heaves and large variations in moisture content can alter radar reflections of shallower features, but modern road engineering minimizes the risk of these factors, and deeper features typically remain stable over time. Another benefit: It’s difficult for malicious actors to alter or fake underground geography or to spoof radar reflections.
WaveSense is operating on $3 million of seed money and is working with several automakers, Tier 1 suppliers, and tech companies to bring GPR to production. The U.S. military has deployed the MIT-developed GPR technology on autonomous vehicles operating in certain areas in Afghanistan; now WaveSense is targeting early-adopter autonomous delivery and ride-hailing companies and plans to map the top 10 urban metroplexes and the major interstates connecting them—all of which limits exposure to potentially problematic environments like poorly drained or undeveloped roads. Pilot programs with certain partners will begin in the New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, L.A., and San Francisco metro areas, with vehicles testing in late 2019.
WaveSense had me at “$100/car” and “mounts underneath.”
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