As the race for the best automotive lidar continues, Cepton adds two new sensors to its Vista lidar series.

Announced last year , the Vista series primarily focuses on delivering a low-cost & high-performance solution for all levels of autonomous driving. With upgraded specifications over the standard Vista , the Vista M and the Vista X bring new development opportunities for vehicle manufacturers.

While the standard Vista featured a 60º field-of-view (FOV), the Vista X doubles it to 120º. This results in improved object perception and localization in a much wider area. In addition, whereas the standard version featured a maximum scanning range of 200 meters, the Vista X goes beyond that limit on 10% reflectivity targets. “The uniform 0.2-degree spatial resolution across the entire FOV eliminates the complexity and safety risk in run-time FOV configurations enabling the design flexibility to integrate Vista-X into the front, back or inside of the vehicle.”

About the size of a box of crayons, the Vista M lidar also features a 120º FOV and a scanning range of 150 meters. According to Cepton , the sensor “provides ideal detection capability for vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles from the four corners of autonomous vehicles.” Although the scanning range is lower than the standard Vista, the M version is smaller, making it easier to integrate with a vehicle, as it fits the headlights, taillights, and side view mirrors.

With the existing partnership between Cepton and Nvidia, the two new sensors will also use Nvidia Drive , the AI supercomputer that combines deep learning and sensor fusion to accurately paint a full, 360-degree environment representing dynamic and static objects encompassing the vehicle.

“High performance and cost-efficient lidar, such as Cepton’s Vista solutions, are important developments that will help bring self-driving vehicles to market,” said Glenn Schuster, senior director, technical marketing, NVIDIA. “By leveraging the Nvidia Drive platform’s high-performance computational capabilities for processing Cepton lidar data, vehicles can get an accurate representation of their surrounding environment to autonomously navigate.”