Series 9 – Episode 3 – The next wave of ADAS technology

Sharma has been around quite a lot of technology over his career. He has spent most of his time developing hardcore R&D technology that was going to get productised. His passion is Lidar and understanding how difficult this problem is and what a solution might look like.

Now, almost all vehicle accidents are caused by human error, which can be reduced with ADAS systems. “The best way to make that split second decision at a high speed is you need a very low latency system. Something that can actually process what’s about to happen faster than a human brain,” Sharma said.

These said high-speed safety features are not possible with the radar or camera-based systems of today. As an alternative, to enable these capabilities fleet-wide and at scale, OEMs need to embrace lidar.

Sharma continues: “If you think about an ADAS system, it has to have a real incredible understanding of what’s happening and very precisely know, within centimetres, how far away it is from another car and be able to say that at this velocity it can avoid said car. That awareness has to be created and that is done with a Lidar system.”

Sharma believes that we will see these ADAS-enabled high-speed safety features becoming commonplace, not just in luxury vehicles, but as standard features across OEM fleets. Just like airbags, it will start with the premium cars but once a system has been shown to work and is scalable then it will be rolled out across the board.

Sharma goes on to speak about MicroVision’s highway Lidar test track work, whether cameras are as effective as Lidar for autonomous driving and what he sees the next wave of ADAS systems looking like.

To hear more about ADAS system, Lidar technology and much more, you can listen to Electronic Specifier’s interview with Sumit Sharma on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.