Cepton, Inc. announced the unveiling of its new automotive lidar, Ultra. Ultra is the world?s slimmest adaptive, long-range lidar, designed based on real OEM requirements for next-generation consumer vehicle ADAS and automated driving capabilities. It boasts Cepton?s latest innovation ?

MagnoSteer? ? to enable an unmatched combination of performance, power efficiency, and compactness: Maximum detection range: 300 m at 10% reflectivity; Angular resolution: 0.05° x 0.05° within regions of interest (ROI); Field of view: 120° (H) x 25° (V) maximum, software definable; Typical Power consumption: 12 W; Data rate: up to 3.8 million points per second; Size: 150 (W) x 24 (H) x 90 (D) mm.

Ultra is by far the smallest, slimmest high-performance automotive lidar on the market today. Similar performing lidar systems are typically triple the volume and double the height. With its extremely compact form factor and power efficiency, Ultra is designed for seamless integration into various locations on a vehicle without the need for an additional cooling system.

It can be embedded behind the windshield and into the roofline, the headlamps and the fascia, enabling high-precision perception for various automotive use cases. Ultra?s software definable field of view and ROIs enable adaptive perception capabilities to help the vehicle stay focused on high-priority objects. The ROIs are dynamically tunable, creating real-time zones around key objects, such as vehicles and pedestrians, making them stand out against background objects that do not require as many data points.

This increases the overall energy efficiency of the automotive perception system without compromising precision. The MagnoSteer architecture also enables more advanced perception capabilities within a single-sensor architecture in the future.