For autonomous vehicles and car companies, 2016 was an exciting year. Multibillion-dollar investments in self-driving technologies were being announced weekly, and then Ford made a bold prediction: It would mass produce self-driving cars for consumers in 2021.
That time “was crazy with ads,” said Alan Hall, Ford communications manager at the time, “and 2021 was the magic number.”
Five years after that missed goal, fully autonomous vehicles decked out with sensors are still not on sale, robotaxis are hovering in only a handful of cities, and self-driving trucks are still limited to pilot projects. Additionally, many of 2016’s favorite autonomous vehicles have since thrown in the towel, such as Luminar, which filed for bankruptcy last December, and robotaxi company Cruise, which General Motors shuttered in 2024 to refocus its efforts on personal vehicles.
But as the autonomous dreams of a decade ago succumbed to practical challenges, other companies have found new applications for their innovations, such as ground-penetrating radar, 3-D radar and advanced lidar (which stands for light detection and ranging).
These new applications cover a variety of uses, including smart city systems and home elder care services, as well as managing 1,500-ton gantries in shipyards and monitoring 800-foot-tall wind turbines. This technology is even being used to improve robots and artificial intelligence systems.
Lidar has seen the widest adoption. Lidar sensors can generate three-dimensional views of their surroundings by bouncing near-infrared light off objects. The technology can create detailed data for traffic monitoring systems, where normal video cameras can be hindered by daylight or complete darkness.
Ouster, a company that bought lidar pioneer Velodyne, has customers such as John Deere, for agricultural applications, and cities, for traffic management. It has sensors installed at hundreds of intersections in cities like Chattanooga, Tennessee, according to Angus Pacala, founder of Ouster.
Omer Keilaf, director and founder of Innoviz, another lidar company, said the technology could also measure the size of vehicles to collect tolls.
A lidar company called Outsight uses lidar to monitor pedestrian traffic at airports, including Dallas Fort Worth International. The data allows monitoring where video surveillance may be impractical or undesirable due to privacy concerns.
Improvements made to develop lidar for cars, making them smaller and impervious to the elements, also refined the technology for other challenging outdoor uses, such as security systems for military installations and critical infrastructure.
“The most obvious example is a remote facility like a data center in the woods,” Pacala said. At night, video cameras can’t see very far and metal fences and electric cables cause problems for traditional radars, Innoviz’s Keilaf added. Consequently, human guards often have to patrol the fences of such facilities, while lidar can do the same job, seeing in the dark without blinking.
At the same time, standard radar systems used in cars for collision avoidance and adaptive cruise control have evolved into what are known as millimeter wave radar systems to compete with lidar. In cars, these sensors can see further and more accurately in poor weather conditions than previous radar systems.
Now the technology seeks broader uses.
Not even a decade ago, a company called Pontosense used “mmwave” radar to alert drivers to the presence of a child in the back seat. It could also monitor the health of a passenger or driver by detecting a person’s breathing and heart rate.
Still, adoption of the automobile was slow. So, about four years ago, Pontosense began tapping into growing demand from seniors who want to stay safely in their homes but can’t afford, or don’t yet need, constant care.
These monitoring systems can track people, even in private spaces like bathrooms and bedrooms, without intrusive video recording. The data is detailed enough to sound an alarm when a person has fallen or is having trouble breathing, but since there is no video footage, the owner retains a sense of privacy.
Another technology once expected to guide autonomous vehicles is ground-penetrating radar. It can see several meters underground and was used commercially to detect buried pipes and conduits and was initially conceived for military applications, including autonomous armored vehicles.
A ground-penetrating radar company called WaveSense was founded in 2017, with the intention of tracking the locations of autonomous vehicles without GPS and in situations where the road surface might have changed, for example, due to resurfacing or snow accumulation. But as that market failed to materialize, WaveSense changed its name to GPR Ground Positioning Radar and began developing its technology for shipping and seaports.
Automating seaports like Rotterdam using established technology requires destroying infrastructure to bury transponders and create geotagged locations. But with ground-penetrating radar, “we don’t need to bury anything,” said Tom Cashman, chief technology officer at BTG Positioning Systems, a Dutch company that runs automated container ports and acquired GPR last fall. Cashman said the technology was being tested, but suggested further developments could allow municipalities to use the technology to detect potholes and sinkholes before they occur.
Self-driving technology was a darling of futurists a decade ago, and now its advances are reaching the latest fascination: artificial intelligence and robots.
At Boston Dynamics, Zack Jackowski, chief product and technology officer, said robotics was benefiting from lessons learned in the automotive space. These include improved high dynamic range cameras, microprocessors that meet rigorous safety standards, and more affordable lidar sensors.
Boston Dynamics, majority owned by Hyundai, is collaborating with the automaker on a humanoid robot called Atlas. Jackowski said almost all members of the company’s safety and perception teams came from autonomous vehicle companies such as Waymo and Zoox. “They’re dealing with the same security issues we are,” he said.
Costs are also falling, allowing this technology to appear in consumer electronics such as robotic lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners, equipped with lidar sensors, said Stefan Sellhusen, director of automated driving engineering at Bosch.
Even with all the consolidation and delays, veterans of the autonomous vehicle wars are convinced that autonomous vehicles are still the future. Before founding self-driving truck technology company Kodiak, Don Burnette began his career at Google’s (now Waymo) self-driving program and then co-founded Otto, which was later acquired by Uber. Referring to Kodiak’s commercial truck testing program, he said, “We’re out there. It’s here. It’s small, but you have to start small.”
Mr Hall now works at a robotaxi company called Motional. “It’s going to take time, but it’s going to happen,” he said, although he acknowledged the tendency of some in the industry to be overly optimistic. “It’s like 2026 is the new 2021.”
