Anand Gopalan, Velodyne Lidar CTO, Discusses Lidar’s Role in Autonomous Vehicle Success at PRECISE Industry Day Conference

Anand Gopalan, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Velodyne Lidar, Inc., will deliver a featured presentation on lidar technology at the upcoming PRECISE Industry Day Conference at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on October 25. Gopalan, a distinguished engineer and recognized lidar expert, will review the critical success factors lidar technology must achieve for autonomous driving and advanced vehicle safety at highway speeds.

At the conference, which seeks to drive cross-industry discussion on "Safe AI" and enable an autonomous tomorrow, Gopalan will discuss how lidar provides a high-resolution image for object classification and tracking, along with real-time distance measurements of surrounding objects needed for autonomous navigation and automated safety. He will share insights on how Velodyne's new, thoroughly tested high-definition 3D lidar provides the millions more data points at highway speeds that are needed to enable advanced level 4 and level 5 autonomous vehicles.

"In this formative stage when the industry is working to prove safety cases for autonomous vehicles, automakers need to focus on perception systems that provide greater amounts of clean, measured data points. This can aid in the vehicle's ability to make more informed and correct decisions. These systems must also provide exceptional accuracy and reliability to address special safety concerns when driving at highway speeds," said Gopalan.

Gopalan will address how his Velodyne team is tackling navigation and safety challenges for autonomous vehicles. After delving into technological performance metrics, including range, accuracy and resolution, Gopalan will examine reliability and scalability metrics needed to ensure automotive-grade dependability at production volumes required by automakers as well as consumers.

At Velodyne Lidar, Gopalan is responsible for the advanced product development and technology development that are powering the company's next generation lidar products. He is a seasoned technology executive with experience building and leading worldwide engineering organizations for the development of products in consumer, networking and enterprise domains. At Penn, Gopalan serves on PRECISE's Industry Advisory Board, which is led by Justin Gottschlich, Ph.D., Head of Machine Programming Research at Intel Labs.

About Velodyne Lidar

Velodyne provides smart, powerful lidar solutions for autonomy and driver assistance. Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., Velodyne is known worldwide for its portfolio of breakthrough lidar sensor technologies. Velodyne's Founder and CEO, David Hall, invented real-time surround view lidar systems in 2005 as part of Velodyne Acoustics. Mr. Hall's invention revolutionized perception and autonomy for automotive, new mobility, mapping, robotics, and security. Velodyne's high-performance product line includes a broad range of sensing solutions, including the cost-effective Puck™, the versatile Ultra Puck™, the autonomy-advancing Alpha Puck™, the ADAS-optimized Velarray™, and the groundbreaking software for driver assistance, Vella™.

About PRECISE (Penn Research In Embedded Computing and Integrated Systems Engineering)

PRECISE's research involves finding fundamental and practical solutions to problems of modeling, control, simulation, operation, formal method and the implementation of embedded/cyber physical systems. Their new "Safe AI" roadmap will focus on developing techniques for intelligent, reliable, autonomous complex systems, which can also be used to establish confidence in the reliability and robustness of learning-enabled autonomous systems.