LiDAR has been a cornerstone of autonomous vehicle and robotics industries. While it’s become an industry standard, the technology has its drawbacks. Chief among them is high cost. As the former CTO and CEO of LiDAR leader Velodyne, Anand Gopalan is aware of the tech’s pluses and minuses. It’s telling, then, that the executive’s latest undertaking opted to skip out on the tech altogether. In fact, Vayu Robotics is positioning LiDAR-free navigation as one of its biggest selling points. Co-founded in 2022 by Gopalan — two years after taking Velodyne public via SPAC — Vayu Robotics is working to make delivery robotics cheaper and more scalable. Ditching LiDAR is a piece of that puzzle. Instead, the company has embraced foundation models: the machine learning technology at the heart of the recent generative AI explosion. “The traditional mobile robotics approach involved putting multiple sensors on a robot (often at great cost) and then writing software in the form of modules that are built to do one task at a time,” Gopalan writes in a press release. “This leads to very expensive sensors and compute, combined with very brittle software that cannot deal with uncertainty or new situations. “Instead we have taken an approach that involves a transformer based mobility foundation model combined with a new type of powerful passive sensor that does away with the need for lidar especially in low speed applications.”

Full report : Former Velodyne CEO’s delivery robot startup is ditching LiDAR for foundation models.