Ouster's new color lidar is coming to replace cameras

The tech industry has spent the last decade debating whether self-driving cars need lidar sensors, cameras, or both. Lidar company Ouster claims to have found a solution: a sensor that combines both. On Monday, San Francisco-based Ouster announced its new lineup of lidar sensors, called 'Rev8,' which offer 'native color lidar.' These sensors can capture color imagery and three-dimensional depth information at the same time, effectively doing the work of two sensors in one.

Ouster CEO Angus Pacala said the development has been a decade in the making, and he's ambitious about the new product lineup. In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Pacala called it the 'holy grail of what a roboticist has always wanted.' 'For all of human history, it's been: you buy a lidar sensor, you buy a camera, and you try to make sense of the combination with some higher level reasoning, and waste an enormous amount of time doing this,' he told TechCrunch. 'And companies only get really halfway there in terms of calibrating and fusing the data streams.' Ouster's new sensors aim to change this equation.

'The goal is to obviate cameras,' Pacala said. 'There's no reason that one sensor can't do both.' The Rev8 lineup arrives at a dynamic moment for lidar companies, with a years-long wave of consolidation happening, including Ouster's acquisition of Velodyne and Luminar's assets being acquired in bankruptcy. A color lidar that combines pinpoint depth information with camera-quality image data could be especially valuable to robotics players, Pacala said.

Ouster worked with Fujifilm and image science company DXOMARK to understand 'what it means to build a great camera.' Pacala claims Ouster's color lidar is 'improving in many ways on a modern camera' thanks to the company's digital lidar architecture and single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors. The company has already shipped samples to existing customers and is now taking orders. Pacala is particularly proud of the OS1 Max sensor, which he considers to be 'the industry's best long range lidar.' It can see 500 meters in all directions and is smaller than other long-range lidar 'by a big margin.'