Vayu Sense: Next generation sensing for next generation mobility
A major debate in the world of autonomous vehicles (AV), advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and robotics centers around the right combination of sensors. Several AV companies continue to use LiDAR while others, such as Tesla, have strongly professed a camera-only approach, despite known inadequacies of current camera technologies. One simple approach would be to use all of sensor types on a vehicle or robot, but this is approach is impractical as large scale deployments become too expensive as a dominant portion of the bill of materials. At Vayu, we have been exposed to all sides of this issue, having built complex camera and LiDAR systems for many different technology and sensor companies, with a collective 50+ years of experience in sensing and perception for mobile systems. The collective learning from our team's experience has led to Vayu Sense, Vayu's sensor technology.
What is Vayu Sense?
The biological world is full of examples where living beings can extract extremely advanced information from the visual world. This is done by extracting other aspects of the light field beyond average intensity. This additional information is embedded not just in the intensity of the received photon, but the oscillation angles of its electromagnetic field, the wavelength bands in which information resides and the angles at which the light is received. Vayu Sense combines dense, low cost CMOS image sensors with modern computational imaging and machine learning techniques to reliably extract this information in the context of machine mobility. The power of Vayu Sense in solving known challenging corner cases, working in difficult environmental conditions, all the while maintaining the high reliability and low-cost basis of a traditional camera.
Making Cameras Better!
Camera technology will continue to be the workhorse for robotics due to its high reliability and low cost. The first goal of Vayu Sense is to make traditional cameras better by overcoming known challenges. In this series of blog posts, we show how Vayu Sense can outperform state-of-the-art sensors and provide robust perception in a variety of scenarios known to be challenging for mobility.
Part 1: Performance in High Dynamic Range scenarios
Part 2: Performance in low light and adverse weather conditions
Part 3: Detection of hard-to-see objects that are small or transparent
