
Image-grade LiDAR system for autonomous vehicles now available
The funding was co-led by NIO Capital and Eight Roads Ventures in China, and F-Prime Capital in the US. Seed funder Gaorong Capital and unnamed strategic investors also participated in the round. Nio Capital is based in Shanghai and Gaorong Capital in Beijing.
The company was was co-founded by Junwei Bao, who serves as CEO and Yimin Li, who serves as CTO. Prior to founding Innovusion Bao led the the sensor and hardware team at Baidu’s autonomous business unit where Li worked as a sensing hardware architect.
Innovusion claims its Cheetah lidar is the world’s first image-grade lidar to support level 4+ driving, defined as fully autonomous operation under certain operating conditions.

It appears that the lidar is laser based and probably scanning rather than rotating and has high resolution of 300 lines and it can detect objects more than 200 meters away.
The range allows autonomous cars to make decisions at freeway speeds and in complex driving situations. The company also fuses lidar and video data in hardware to reduce latency with a superior sensor performance. The design is compact (see pic). Innovusion is ramping production to meet worldwide demand starting in 4Q18.
Innovusion began shipping samples of Cheetah in the second quarter of 2018.
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