Altos Radar recently announced that it raised $3.5 million in a seed round of funding that will accelerate the commercialization of 4D imaging radars in driver-assisted and autonomous vehicles. The funding round – led by Hesai Technology CEO David (Yifan) Li, ZhenFund, and Monad Ventures – will be used to mass-produce and market Altos Radar’s new high-performance 4D imaging RADAR Altos V1, which demonstrates revolutionary perception capabilities at a fraction of the cost of its competitors.
Since launching in 2017, the FCC and other global RF regulators opened the 76-81GHz frequency band for automotive radar use. And this enabled the possibility of producing high-resolution radars at one-third the size of the previously used 24GHz radars with similar angular resolution.
Many companies have been racing to develop this technology, including a well-known electric car company, which brought back their radars for their FSD (Full Self-Driving) Hardware 4.0 upgrade earlier this year.
Altos Radar differentiates itself from the competition due to its real-time, onboard computed, LIDAR-like point clouds from a ready-to-ship product. And the radar offers long-range detection and a point cloud with up to 3,000 points per frame at 10 fps.
Plus, Altos Radar’s team has achieved state-of-the-art performance on low-cost, mass-produced automotive System on Chips (SOCs). And this makes Altos V1 radar the world’s first production-ready non-FPGA-based, 4-chip cascaded (12TX, 16RX) 4D imaging radar, offering great advantages in cost, reliability and mass-producibility.
Due to the nature of radio waves, radars outperform other types of sensors in their unique capability for far-range detection spanning hundreds of meters, instant and accurate velocity measurement, and resiliency in adverse weather conditions. And as a pioneer in the field of high-performance 4D radars, Altos V1’s detection capacity can now achieve an unprecedented range of 500m for cars and 180m for pedestrians.
What has been impeding traditional radars from playing a bigger role in the autonomous vehicle sensor suite is the lack of height information, low angular resolution, and suboptimal signal-noise performance – all of which the new generation of 4D imaging radars by Altos Radar is set to change.
The team at Altos Radar are experts in electronics design, signal processing algorithms, compute optimization, and radar perception in autonomous vehicles, having held leading R&D positions at Hitachi, ZF, Huawei, and Pony.ai, and in the autonomous driving departments of Apple and Lyft.
Altos Radar’s new high-performance 4D millimeter-wave RADAR caters to the demands of a 4D imaging radar market that Yole’s 2022 Automotive Radar Report estimated will double year-over-year by 2027 to $8 billion. And projections from McKinsey’s Autonomous Driving’s Future Report show potential revenues from the autonomous driving market could hit $400 billion by 2035.
