TetraVue, the company which has set forth to upgrade self-driving cars with ultra high resolution 3-D cameras and optics, has announced that it is raising an impressive $10 million from Foxconn, Nautilus Venture Partners, Robert Bosch Venture Capital and Samsung Catalyst Fund.
TetraVue was founded in 2008 at Carlsbad, California and is working on a so called “entirely new approach” of using LIDAR technology, which lets it use laser powered lights for observing and scanning the surrounding area in its devices. They have also built a solid state (no moving parts ) prototype of a 3-D camera which they can be installed in autonomous cars.
3-D cameras will serve as the eyes of autonomous vehicles. To maneuver through heavy traffic at a high speed requires a lot of precision, and the driving situations become even worse in low light and bad weather conditions. The high resolution 3-D cameras installed in the cars can come in handy at such instances. They not just analyze the environment specifically and instantly but can do that at any provided speed and environmental condition, proving to be the most essential part of the vehicles.
The company is not the only one attempting to create technologies for the cars of the future. Automobile behemoth BMW recently allied with chip maker Intel for test running 40 autonomous vehicles an the roads of U.S. and Europe in 2017, and for the quest they have hired the Israeli computer vision company Mobileye — which specializes in building driver-less car tech. Also, as a step towards boosting its potential in the autonomous market, Intel recently acquired a computer vision startup Itseez. At the same time the deep learning start-up Neurala raised $14 million for building thinking technology for autonomous vehicles and drones through an SDK which allows developers to access exceptional knowledge to integrate into their works.
In a statement, TetraVue says that their technology is capable enough to make 2 million — or beyond — simultaneous distance measurements of ranges exceeding 200 meters in any given weather condition. And like a traditional LIDAR technology, their product is not confined to the automotive industry, but their 3-D cameras are equally suited for other industries like enterprise-level mapping and augmented reality (AR) as well.
Connie Sheng, founding managing director at Nautilus Venture Partners said;
TetraVue’s LIDAR gives cars perfect vision and allows them to make better decisions. Imagine a car being able to instantly determine if a black spot is a rock or a plastic bag.
