Volvo Car Corp.’s role in the autonomous vehicle segment is not limited to supplying tech firms with cars for their self-driving fleets.

The Swedish automaker, like most of its top competitors, is also working on homegrown autonomous driving capabilities in a bid to woo consumers. Volvo today announced that it’s moving the effort up a gear through a new collaboration with Luminar Technologies Inc., an emerging maker of LiDAR hardware.

LiDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging. It’s the sensing method used in the vast majority of self-driving car projects to help vehicles see their surroundings.

Luminar’s platform is based on the same basic principle as the competing LiDAR solutions out there. The system fires millions of short laser bursts into the environment every second and captures the light that bounces back. After ingesting the data, a self-driving car’s computer can assemble the individual pulses into a 3-D map of its surroundings.

As part of the collaboration with Luminar, Volvo has made a strategic investment in the startup and will start adopting its technology. The car maker reportedly plans to fit Luminar LiDAR units into the self-driving vehicles that it’s currently testing in Mountain View, California.

Volvo is also set to become the first customer of a new “perception development platform” that the startup debuted alongside the partnership. According to Luminar, the software can analyze LiDAR measurements to identify people and objects that a vehicle’s computer should be aware of.

Speaking to TechCrunch, Luminar Chief Executive Officer Austin Russell said that the goal is to help automakers apply his startup’s system more effectively. He pointed out that some companies have been using dated 2-D algorithms to analyze the 3D information produced by LiDAR platforms.

On the occasion, Russell also divulged that Volvo will use Luminar’s new software for the purpose of enabling autonomous driving on highways. The company is one of a total of four automakers that have partnered with the startup so far.

Image: Volvo