You're going to have to be more specific with your necessary specs, there are $100 360° hobbyist LIDAR sensors on Amazon.

No there aren't. Those use triangulation. LIDAR is time-of-flight. They also only scan a single rotating point which is only sufficient for simple robots like vacuum cleaners.

Intel's L515 lidar from 2020 was <$300, uses MEMS ToF instead of rotating for very high speed scanning. 730p@30.

Good indoor range but not really useful outdoors at any range. Scaling to higher power is indeed a challenge, but that Intel delivered so so much in 2020 for such a small price is awesome, shows potential.

Damn that looks amazing! Such a shame they abandoned RealSense.

Still, $300 is not $100 and presumably they were selling at big loss, otherwise they wouldn't have shuttered RealSense.

Apple has ToF lidar for face recognition for years now. It's a matter of spec.

Similar style single chip lidar for automotive is in engineering sampling phase now [1]. Price remains to be seen but anything sub 1k would be a no-brainer to add to a robo-taxi.

Oh, everyone in the industry thinks Tesla is .. how to put it nicely .. is irrelevant for the future because of their CEOs stance on sensors. Camera will never be enough.

https://scantinel.com/2023/07/03/scantinel-photonics-launche...

There is no reliable FSD implementation on any car right now so it's kind of an irrelevant question.

The more relevant one is what will happen first. Tesla figuring out how to make vision only work on their existing hardware. Or the price of LiDAR coming down.

On-chip lidars are coming to automotive sector currently

I’ve ridden Waymo in SF and it has gone great. The cost was cheaper than the cheapest Lyft/Uber, but in a much nicer vehicle. I felt 100% safe the whole time, which is better than I can say about humans who get paid more if they drive faster. My only complaint is cases like where it “wasted” a few minutes because it didn’t want to do an illegal U-turn during the pickup (any human driver would have done it).

The word “reliable” without any units attached isn’t well-defined, so I can’t say whether Waymo meets that bar, but it’s a good customer experience.

FYI Waymo is typically ~30% more expensive than Lyft/Uber in SF.

If you buy en masse maybe. We buy such devices on or few at a time for industrial use cases, and those will cost you 10k€ for the big ones, and maybe less for the smaller ones. lots of development happening in the space tho.