Remember Velodyne Acoustics, the maker of high-performance subwoofers for the specialty A/V channel (until they went all Amazon on us)? That company is now a major player in the world of LiDAR, the light-emitting technology that helps self-driving cars navigate the roads, among other things.
Velodyne, based in Morgan Hill, Calif., just received $150 million in funding from Ford and Baidu, the Chinese search-engine giant. Like its U.S. counterpart Google, Baidu is investing heavily in the autonomous vehicle business.
Ford has been working with Velodyne LiDAR for several years, USA Today reports. The car maker expects to deliver a fully autonomous vehicle by 2021.
Velodyne was founded in 1983 by David Hall, who patented an “accelerometer-based High Gain Servo System to control woofer cone movement.”
Read the interesting story about Velodyne’s transformation here.
