LiDAR startup Luminar announced that it has collaborated with Autonomous Intelligent Driving (AID), the subsidiary of Audi. Through the partnership, Luminar is providing its forward-facing and long-range LiDAR technology to accelerate plans towards AID’s first fully autonomous deployments in 2021.

AID is a startup founded by Audi with the purpose to provide autonomous driving technologies for the Volkswagen Group. Since the company launched in March last year, AID tapped Luminar as its first partner for realizing its vision to deploy true and safe autonomy in urban environments and beyond. Luminar remains a key player as part of a larger partnership program by AID to accelerate their full-stack developments.

(Image: Luminar)

AID is currently testing its fleet on roads in Munich with Luminar sensors and uses proprietary software and deep learning-based approaches to process all sensing modalities such as LiDAR point clouds, camera pixels, and radar echoes. This perception data models the vehicle’s environment, both near and far, by detecting objects, vehicles, pedestrians and other challenging obstacles.

“AID is an ideal partner for Luminar with the backing and resources of the world’s largest OEM, while maintaining a fresh software-minded spirit of a high-growth startup,” said Luminar founder and chief executive officer, Austin Russell. “Together, our teams are able to achieve rapid development with an agile, hands-on approach - combining hardware and software expertise to enable autonomous mobility service by 2021.”