Gartner Names AEye Cool Vendor in AI for Computer Vision

PLEASANTON, Calif., June 7, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AEye, a leader in artificial perception systems, today announced that it has been named a Cool Vendor in AI for Computer Vision in Gartner's annual report, which identifies new and innovative vendors, products and services transforming and disrupting technology. This is the latest in a string of accolades for AEye and its groundbreaking robotic perception system for autonomous vehicles.

Since the beginning of the year, AEye's unique approach to artificial perception, which embeds artificial intelligence with sensors that fuse a 2D camera with agile LiDAR, has been recognized by numerous organizations.  AEye has been named a Cool Vendor, Vital Disruptor, and Most Innovative Tech Company of the Year by Gartner, Frost & Sullivan, and the American Business Awards (ABA) respectively.

AEye's groundbreaking iDAR™ (Intelligent Detection and Ranging) artificial perception system, received a Stevie Gold for Technical Innovation of the Year. Its iDAR-based, AE100 is AEye's first product for the automotive market and has received similar acclaim. The AE100 product has garnered the company an ABA Stevie Gold for Hardware, an AUVSI XCELLENCE award in the Detect & Avoid category, and an Auto Connected Car TechCARS award for the Best Newly-Offered LiDAR Solution.

"AEye's hardware and software engineering teams have continued to evolve AEye's iDAR system to achieve excellence, and that progress has been duly recognized by a cascading stream of awards and accolades this year," said Dr Barry Behnken, AEye's Vice President of Engineering. "As the world's first agile sensing LiDAR system, iDAR improves reliability, radically lowers power requirements and reduces median system bandwidth -- advances that are key to providing high resolution, low-latency mobility solutions for autonomous vehicles."

High Marks from Influencers
Frost & Sullivan named AEye a Vital Disruptor in its Global Autonomous Driving Market Outlook, which looks at startups that are racing to the far edges of reshaping transportation. The criteria included technology superiority, scalable business model, market attractiveness, investment pattern and management team.

In Gartner's Cool Vendor in AI for Computer Vision report, transportation and mobility analyst Michael Ramsey stated, "AEye offers a very novel combination of sensor fusion at the processor level of camera and lidar sensors for primary use with autonomous vehicles. There are several features of the company's offerings that are attracting attention from automakers, including one major company that has a development agreement. The promises include a durable solid-state device with a single, 1,550 nanometer (nm) (eye safe) laser, long range, fidelity and capability to focus on distinct objects in the field."

AEye was one of a select group of companies to take home three Stevie Golds in the American Business Awards (ABA), the world's premier business awards program. More than 3,700 nominations were reviewed by more than 200 judges, whose average scores determined the winners.

Some of the comments included, "The best part of the innovation is AEye's iDAR technology which mimics how a human's visual cortex focuses on and evaluates potential driving hazards," "AEye's iDAR software takes an innovative approach to improve the response time of autonomous vehicles sensing capabilities that allows the sensors to make decisions based upon input vs. the traditional method of routing the inputs upstream to a CPU for evaluation," and "AEye's work is a critical enabler to safe autonomy which will have an enormous impact on future transportation."

"At the sensor level, iDAR combines pixels from digital 2D cameras with voxels from AEye's Agile 3D LiDAR to create Dynamic Vixels, said Joel Benscoter, AEye's product team lead.  "This new sensor data type can be dynamically interrogated through embedded artificial intelligence at the point of data acquisition.  With iDAR, Autonomous vehicles are now able to intelligently assess and respond to situational changes in real-time, thereby increasing the safety and efficiency of the overall system."

iDAR can identify objects with minimal structure, such as a bike, and differentiate objects of the same color such as a black tire on asphalt. In addition, it can leverage the unique capabilities of agile LiDAR to react to changing weather for example, automatically increasing power during fog, rain, or snow.  Likewise, iDAR's heightened sensory perception allows autonomous vehicles to determine contextual changes, such as the direction a child is facing, which can then be used to better calculate the probability of the child stepping out onto the street, enabling the car to prepare for the likelihood of a sudden stop.

AEye's AE100 automotive product will be available this summer to OEMs and Tier 1s launching autonomous vehicle initiatives. For more information about AEye and its innovative approach to artificial perception, please visit www.aeye.ai.

About AEye
AEye is an artificial perception pioneer and creator of iDAR™, a new form of intelligent data collection that acts as the eyes and visual cortex of autonomous vehicles. Since its demonstration of its solid-state LiDAR scanner in 2013, AEye has pioneered breakthroughs in intelligent sensing. The company is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and backed by world-renowned investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Airbus Ventures and Intel Capital. For more information, please visit www.aeye.ai.

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