Safe and widely accepted autonomous transportation has moved one step ahead with the announcement by Luminar of its latest innovation, a new sensing and perception platform called Iris. This follows on Luminar’s prior technology breakthroughs of sensors for autonomous development fleets and their LiDAR chip technology, which was unveiled in 2017.
Luminar has been disrupting the autonomous vehicle markets for a while now with continuous innovation, gaining traction from their breakthrough high-resolution 3D data and working with 12 of the world’s top 15 automotive companies including Volvo, Toyoto, and Audi. Iris is slated to launch in 2022 and deliver Level 3 and 4 autonomy to users, exceeding essential performance, safety, cost, and auto-grade requirements.
Luminar is funded by major institutional and strategic investors that includes G2VP, two sovereign wealth funds, Moore Strategic Ventures LLC, Nick Woodman, The Westly Group, 1517 Fund / Peter Thiel and Canvas Ventures, bringing in additional capital that helps propel the company into the consumer and commercial trucking series production vehicle market. With a comprehensive hardware-software package, the company leads the autonomous driving industry with technology including sensor fusion, auto-calibration, tracking, object detection, and simulation.
“We’ve been following the LiDAR industry closely for the last 5 years, watching for a technology leader to emerge that can enable Level 4 autonomy,” said Ben Kortlang, Founding Partner at G2VP, in a press statement. “With the release of Iris, Luminar uniquely offers a LiDAR solution that meets the performance, safety and cost metrics that OEMs require to commercialize autonomous vehicles. Luminar’s product is the enabling technology that will put autonomous vehicles on the road sooner than we expected.”
