Is LiDAR on its way out? The business case for saying goodbye

The next wave of IT innovation will be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. We look at the ways companies can take advantage of it and how to get started.

Among the deluge of robotics predictions you're bound to encounter this year, there's one you should pay particular attention to: The way robots "see" is fundamentally changing, and that's going to have a huge impact on the utility cost and proliferation of robotic systems.

Of course, it's a bit of a mischaracterization to talk about robots "seeing," or at least a reductive shorthand for a complex interplay of software and hardware that's allowing robots to do much more sophisticated sensing with much less costly equipment. Machine vision incorporates a variety of technologies and increasingly relies on software in the form of machine learning and AI to interpret and process data from 2D sensors that would have been unachievable even a short time ago.

With this increasing reliance on software comes an interesting shift away from highly specialized sensors like LiDAR, long a staple for robots operating in semi-structured and unstructured environments. Robotics experts marrying the relationship between humans and AI software are coming to find that LiDAR isn't actually necessary. Rather, machine vision is providing higher quality mapping\at a more affordable cost, especially when it comes to indoor robotics and automation.

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