The future of lidar is uncertain unless, as Voyant hopes to do, its price and size are reduced to fractions of their current values. As long as lidars are sandwich-sized devices that cost thousands, they won’t be ubiquitous — so Voyant has raised some cash to bring its smaller, cheaper, more easily manufactured, yet still highly capable lidar to production.
When I wrote up the company’s seed round back in 2019, the goal was more or less to shrink lidar down from sandwich to fingernail size using silicon photonics. But the real challenge faced by nearly every lidar company is getting the price down. Between a strong laser, capable receptor, and a mechanical or optical means of directing the beam, it just isn’t easy …
