When her phone rang in February, Mashawn Cross was skeptical of the gentle voice offering help at the end of the line. "You said you do what? And you're with who?" the 52-year-old recalled saying. Cross, who wasn't working because of her ailing back and knees, was scraping by on roughly $200 a month in aid plus whatever she could make from recycling bottles and cans. Her gas and electric bills were chewing up her checks.

Police Officer aims his Lidar, towards drivers that may be speeding (PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty ... [ ] Images) As LiDAR matures into a critical sensor for ADAS and Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), balancing the styling aspects of vehicle integration with functionality is becoming increasingly important. In this sense, LiDAR is simply following in the footsteps of legacy sensors like radar, cameras, and ultrasonic. They were highly visible in early deployments, but are generally invisible today. In the absence of this, components like the laser, detector, and scanner will heat up and cause performance and reliability issues. Solid-state LiDAR (either flash or using solid-state scanning) has clear advantages in this regard.

Lidar startup Baraja has raised $32 million in a series A round of funding led by Sequoia China and Main Sequence Ventures' CSIRO Innovation Fund, with participation from Blackbird Ventures. Founded out of Sydney, Australia, in 2015, Baraja is one of a number of lidar startups targeting the burgeoning driverless car industry with the necessary smarts to safely navigate busy thoroughfares without human intervention. Lidar technology essentially surveys the environment by beaming out laser-powered light to measure distances. Anyone who has observed the big players in the autonomous vehicle realm, such as Alphabet's Waymo, will have noticed the giant spinning lasers mounted atop the vehicle's roof that rotate to garner a comprehensive view of the environment. These are not only bulky, but expensive -- perhaps prohibitively expensive if self-driving cars are ever to hit mass production.

In the land of the self-driving vehicle, the car with the best lidar sensor is king. So goes the logic of the booming self-driving car industry. To drive safely, an autonomous vehicle needs to see the world around it, and the best way to do that is with a system that fires millions of pulses of light every second, measuring how long they take to bounce off nearby objects and building a detailed 3-D map. It's a young technology--the first application designed specifically for driving dates to 2005--and remains expensive and unproven when it comes to the automotive grade reliability the car industry requires. That's why dozens of lidar makers have emerged in recent years, each claiming they've got the laser-flinging solution that offers the right balance of range, resolution, robustness--and cost.