Ouster’s new color LiDAR will replace the cameras.

The tech industry has spent the last decade asking whether self-driving cars need LiDAR sensors, cameras, or all of the above. Lidar company Ouster says it has a new answer: putting the two on the same sensor.

On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced a new lineup of LiDAR sensors called “Rev8” that offer so-called “native color LiDAR.” This sensor can simultaneously capture color images and 3D depth information, performing the tasks of two sensors in one.

Ouster CEO Angus Pacala said his company has been in development for a decade, and in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, he wasn’t shy about his ambitions for the new product lineup, calling it “the holy grail of what roboticists have always wanted.”

“Throughout human history, we’ve been buying lidar sensors and cameras and trying to understand the combination through higher-level reasoning, and we’ve wasted a ton of time doing that,” he told TechCrunch. “And companies are really only halfway there in terms of orchestrating and fusing data streams.”

Ouster’s new sensor changes that equation, he said.

“The goal is to eliminate cameras. There’s no reason one sensor can’t do both,” he said.

The Rev8 lineup arrives at a dynamic moment for rider companies. There has been a wave of consolidation over the years, with Ouster acquiring Velodyne and Luminar’s assets recently being acquired out of bankruptcy.

At the same time, the sensor market is also growing explosively. Waymo and others have finally deployed working robotaxis and are scaling rapidly. Humanoid and industrial robot companies are raising investment funds and need sensors to perceive the world. There is so much interest in this field that new companies like Boston-based Teradar are emerging and testing the waters in entirely new ways. (For Teradar, we are using terahertz imaging.)

Color LiDAR, which combines accurate depth information with camera-quality image data, could be particularly useful to robotics players, Pacala said. And he said Ouster worked with Fujifilm and image science company DXOMARK to understand “what it means to make a great camera.”

In fact, Pacala claims that Ouster’s color LiDAR “improves on modern cameras in many ways” thanks to the way the company has already designed and built its sensors.

Ouster uses the so-called “digital LiDAR” architecture. Instead of an analog approach that involves a lot of moving parts, Ouster uses a single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detector to capture LiDAR information directly on a custom chip.

The company is using the same SPAD technology to capture color image data from the Rev8 sensor. Pacala said this new technology makes image capture more sensitive than a regular camera.

“This is 48-bit color, which is equivalent to megapixel resolution, and a dynamic range of 116 dB. These are top-notch numbers that give a good camera, but it also happens to be a 3D colorized point cloud, delivered as a pre-fused data stream,” he said. “You can actually use the data as a camera stream, but that’s one of the powerful features of this system. Depending on how forward-thinking your perception team is, you can use just the LiDAR data stream, just the camera data stream, or even just the pre-fused data stream.”

Pacala said his company has already shipped samples to existing customers and is currently taking orders. He said he is particularly proud of the OS1 Max sensor, which he considers “the best long-distance lidar in the industry.” It can see 500 meters in all directions and is “by a huge margin” smaller than other long-distance riders.

“We have long-range LiDAR, but it’s certainly not better than everything else,” he said. “It’s a big leap forward for Ouster. I think this means we’ll see a lot more of it in high-speed robo-truck, robotaxi applications, and I think a lot of drone-related areas will transition to OS1 Max.”

Other new lidars built on the Rev8 platform will include OS0, OS1 and OSDome, according to the press release.

Ouster isn’t the only company starting to talk about color LiDAR. Last month, Chinese company Hesai announced its own color LiDAR platform and said it would begin mass production by the end of this year. Other companies, such as Innoviz, have previously published their own take on “color LiDAR.”

Pacala says most other companies trying to “fuse” cameras and LiDAR sensors are essentially packaging them together in a box. The approach Ouster (and, to be fair, Hesai) is taking is to put LiDAR and imaging technology on the same chip.

Pacala said this dramatically reduces the amount of work Ouster’s customers have to do to understand competing sensor streams, and ultimately allows customers to avoid cameras altogether. At the same time, it is cheaper and smaller than Ouster’s previous technology.

“This is fundamentally changing the value proposition of what we sell to our customers from this stage forward,” he told TechCrunch.