Israeli Start-Up Claims System Can See Like a Bee In the Scan

In the race to develop fully autonomous vehicles, Israeli start-Up Lirhot Systems says they "see" the road ahead and assess potential hazards. While most leading industry actors have relied on and heavily invested in laser-based LiDAR (light detection and ranging) three-dimensional sensors for self-driving navigation, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been the primary – and vocal – proponent of navigation based on using inexpensive cameras and radar. While developers continue to argue among themselves regarding the pros and cons of the two systems, Rehovot-based robotic vision start-up Lirhot Systems says it has developed a third method of navigation: a camera-like sensor inspired by insect navigation. "In nature, you have bugs and insects that navigate in a specific way, and we're copying that to enable autonomous vehicles to see," Lirhot CEO Shlomi Voro, an applied physicist with dozens of patents in the field of quantum physics, told The Jerusalem Post. "We were inspired by the heads of bees, their artificial intelligence-like neural network, size, accuracy of navigation, and how they see the world through their five eyes – two for vision and three for navigation."