Re: [HBRobotics] cheaper lidar

[Chris Albertson]

Unitree has a bot-size LIDAR for about $400.

Then I saw one DIY LIDAR where a person bought a cheap $30 vacuum cleaner lidar and mounted it on a pan/tilt platform that would move the entire assembly and could do 3D scans.   But you can imagine how slow that would be.  Better to just spend the $400.

It is very hard to beat the cost of vision.  Cameras are very inexpensive.  The only trouble is that you need a large computer to process vision.   But on a moving robot you don’t even need stereo.  "Depth from motion" algorithms are very good

On Oct 20, 2025, at 11:43 PM, A J <aj48...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey All,

   I'm wondering if the price of mass-produced car Lidar has come down to

 hundreds of dollars, making it an option on all cars. Seems like it would not

 take time to make bot-sized multiple laser units with ASICs. The key seems 

 to be the demand for massive amounts of sensors like Radar, Lidar and Stereo

 vision.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/founder-worlds-top-lidar-maker-000801631.html

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[A J]

In the self-driving car class, we used a high-quality video camera to read the road.

With the better camera lenses, the calculations are fast for localization. 

We also used point clouds to navigate around the track. Some of the radars

seem to see around corners. But for Bots, cameras seem fine for everyday use.