Lidar Visionary at the forefront of autonomous mobility wins AutoSens award

AEye, Inc. (NASDAQ: LIDR), the global leader in adaptive, high-performance LiDAR solutions, today announced that AEye founder and CTO Luis Dussan has been awarded the 2020 Vision Award by AutoSens. The inaugural award, judged by a panel of esteemed judges from companies including General Motors and Nvidia, recognizes an individual whose progress within the vehicle perception ecosystem is shaping the industry in a big way, and whose impact will last for years to come.

Dussan, whose background is in the military and defense industries, has taken a novel approach to LiDAR sensing. He applied the principles he used designing mission-critical targeting systems for fighter jets to build a perception system for autonomous vehicles that helps them see, classify, and respond to threats in real time. AEye’s adaptive LiDAR system is designed to leverage AI and edge processing to move the complexity from the hardware to the software, enabling the collection of higher quality information with less data, for better, faster, and more accurate perception.

Dussan knew that LiDAR needed to enable functionality that cameras and radar could not – such as tracking small objects and lateral entries in fast moving and dynamic environments. By putting intelligent software on the sensor, he created a system that substantially increases situational awareness and the probability of detection, while reducing false positives without impacting size, weight, power, or cost. It is the first LiDAR platform that is adaptable through software to meet the specific needs of OEM customers.

“I’m honored to accept this award on behalf of the entire team at AEye,” said Dussan. “Our adaptive LiDAR’s unique intelligence and software-configurability have driven critical improvements in performance, vision capabilities, and reliability that were designed to advance vehicle perception and benefit the entire industry. Our system is aimed at solving today’s toughest corner cases, but also provide OEMs a pathway, through software, for the future – with the ability to add features and improve performance over time. This type of flexibility will be a requirement for the systems of tomorrow.”

The team responsible for building this technology includes esteemed scientists and engineers from the defense, telecom, and semiconductor industries leading teams inside world-class organizations, such as NASA, Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon, GE, the U.S. Air Force, NXP, VLSI, and DARPA. Among them, SVP and Chief Engineer John Stockton, who is responsible for product and future component technologies needed to continuously reduce the cost of high performance LiDAR systems; Chief Scientist Allan Steinhardt (former Chief Scientist at DARPA), who helps design the technology and spearheads the development of AEye’s patent portfolio; VP of Systems Engineering, Phillipe Feru; Sr. Director, James Jung, who heads Development Engineering and MEMS technology; Head of Receivers & Modeling, Max Kim; Head of Electrical Engineering, Rolf Wietelmann; Head of Systems Controller Group, Naveen Reddy; Head of Performance Initiatives Group, Todd Gustavson; Head of Systems Hardware, Igor Polishchuk; Head of Test and Integration Group, Pritesh Solanki; and SVP Abhijit Thatte, who heads Software Engineering and AI.

Together, this team designed and put in place AEye’s novel approach to sensing, which puts intelligence inside the sensor to create the highest performing sensing and perception system for the most challenging situations, designed to ensure the highest levels of safety for autonomous driving.

AutoSens is the world’s leading community for ADAS and autonomous vehicle technology development. Its aim is to connect engineers and scientists from across the globe to accelerate technology development and commercial deployment of automotive safety systems.