Valeo’s LiDAR technology received two awards for its best-in-class technology – SAFETYBEST Award 2023 during the AUTOBEST Gala on May 11, 2023, and the ICA Summit Award 2023 in the category ‘Automotive Sensor Hardware Solution of the Year’ on May 15, 2023.
On the occasion, Clément Nouvel, Valeo CTO LiDAR explained that Valeo’s LiDAR technology is the result of more than 10 years of development and has been in production for more than 5 years. He added that it is already in use on vehicles around the world and contributes to the safety of road users as well as to the development of automated mobility.
SCALA 3, the latest generation LiDAR has dramatically increased the domain of operation of private vehicles by providing a wider scope of use and higher speed support. It enables the clients to make robotaxis a reality at scale, using a proven, best-in-class technology in mass production.
It can generate a 3D image of the vehicle’s surroundings delivering a point cloud of a yet unparalleled resolution for an automotive system. Boasting more than 12 million pixels per second (x16 compared with the SCALA 2) and a detection range of 200 meters for low-reflectivity objects and 300 meters for high-reflectivity objects, it sees almost everything, even the objects that are invisible to the human eye. SCALA 3 comes with a suite of software modules, including perception and artificial intelligence-based algorithms. These software modules can easily be embedded on major SoC platforms and run on dedicated ECUs or domain controllers.
Various other features of SCALA 3 include blockage detection, rain & spray detection, and online calibration or misalignment detection furthering safety and reliability. It can even identify objects that neither the driver nor the camera or radars can reliably detect such as a tire left on an unlit black asphalt road.