Light today entered the crowded automotive technology market with the launch of Clarity, a road perception system for autonomous and partially autonomous vehicles that it says can detect objects from much farther away than lidar technology.

Redwood City, California-based Light is led by Chief Executive Officer Dave Grannan and Chief Technology Officer Rajiv Laroia. Grannan is a former Nokia Corp. executive and Laroia previously served as Qualcomm Inc.’s senior vice president of technology.

Most autonomous driving vehicles rely on lidar sensors to see the road ahead. Lidar sensors work by illuminating their surroundings with beams of laser light invisible to the human eye, then capturing the photons that bounce back to assemble a three-dimensional map of the environment. One of the hallmark features of the technology is that it makes it possible to spot even smaller obstacles from fairly large distances.

According to Light, Clarity tops the range of even the most sophisticated lidar system. Clarity sees the environmental using not laser beams but rather standard cameras from existing auto industry suppliers. Using these cameras, Light claims, Clarity can spot objects from up to 1,000 meters (about 3,280 feet) away, a distance that the startup says is three times longer than the range of the industry’s current “best-in-class” lidar hardware. 

Clarity is also described as capable of providing more depth data about the objects in its field of view. The  system uses multiple cameras attached to different parts of a vehicle to generate up to 95 million data points every second, which Light says is 20 times more than what the typical lidar system generates. The more road data is available to a vehicle’s autonomous driving software, the better navigation decisions it can make.

In addition to tomorrow’s self-driving cars, Light says its technology can complement the partially automated driver assistance systems that are already found inside many vehicles today. Clarity’s long range could give vehicles with automatic braking features more time to slow when there’s an obstacle coming up. Moreover, the system’s cameras can track the road surface immediately ahead of a car, which could allow vehicles that have an active suspension system to make more fine-grained adjustments to improve stability. 

But cameras likely won’t replace lidar in the foreseeable future. Many autonomous vehicles currently in the works, such as those being developed by Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo unit, use a mix of different sensors to help them effectively operate under variable light and driving conditions. Light says that Clarity can be used alongside any other, noncamera sensing devices that a vehicle might use, be they lidar systems or an altogether different type of hardware such as radar sensors. 

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