GM Invests Millions Of Dollars To Get Vehicle Radar From Oculii

General Motors, wants to develop a more sophisticated car radar with Oculii. (photo: doc. unsplash)

JAKARTA - The venture capital arm of General Motors Co. has invested millions of dollars in Oculii, a maker of software for US radar sensors used in self-driving cars. This statement comes from the co-founder of Oculii, Steven Hong.

"GM can now use low-cost Oculii software to increase radar resolution and upgrade partially automated vehicles and fully self-driving cars", Hong told Reuters in an interview.

“This investment is a fantastic signal that they are serious about technology and optimistic about radar in general”, said the Stanford University graduate who founded Oculii with his father, Lang Hong, a professor of engineering at Wright State University. But Hong declined to disclose the financial details of the deal.

Tesla Inc removed the radar sensor from its volume models this year and raised questions about the safety and performance of its advanced driver assistant systems.

Radar, which measures the distance between objects, allows the car to accelerate or brake to match its speed to the speed of the vehicle in front. Radar also works well in poor lighting and weather conditions.

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk calls additional sensors like lidar and radar "crutches", doubling down on cheaper cameras and artificial intelligence for its driving automation system.

Hong said he agreed with Tesla's director of artificial intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, about the shortcomings of traditional radar. Karpathy said in June that radar sometimes made "stupid" environmental measurements, holding back his vision system.

"Traditional radars have very low resolution and are very noisy", Hong said. “But the high-resolution radar is a backup key for cameras and other sensors when they fail, providing extra security”.

He hopes Tesla will also want to use this type of radar because the price continues to fall.