Valeo SCALA 3 LiDAR wins CES 2024 Innovation Award

Valeo’s SCALA 3 LiDAR has been recognised as a CES 2024 Innovation Award honoree in the ‘Vehicle Tech & Advanced Mobility’ category.

As the industry recognises the key role of LiDAR technology in the development of autonomous mobility, this award acknowledges once again Valeo’s leading role as a pioneer in bringing this technology to the automotive industry and in producing it at scale.

SCALA 3, Valeo’s third-generation LiDAR perception system, offers an automotive-grade high resolution LiDAR (Light Detection & Ranging) sensor, allowing advanced perception in all conditions meeting the highest automotive industry quality and safety standards. SCALA 3 high-density point cloud and associated AI-based perception software enables high-speed autonomous driving on highways in a wider range of conditions, dramatically increasing the end-user value of Level 3 systems through a large extension of their domain of operation and the scalability of Level 4 robotaxi fleet.

Valeo LiDAR equips the only Level 3 passenger cars authorized in Europe. In March 2023, the company had announced orders worth over a billion euros for the Valeo SCALA 3. Valeo, which is the global leader in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), was the first, and remains the leading company, in the production of automotive LiDAR sensors and perception software on an industrial scale for Level 3 autonomous driving.

Marc Vrecko, President of Valeo Comfort and Driving Assistance, said: “Valeo has been among the first actors of the automotive industry to believe in LiDAR’s role as the keystone of autonomous mobility. We are honoured to receive a CES 2024 Innovation Award that recognises our vision and technological leadership. Today, as most automakers work on bringing Level 3 autonomy to the market, we are ready to support them with our best-in-class technology. After more than 10 years of development and more than five years of production, our LiDAR is already in use on vehicles around the world, contributing significantly to the enhanced safety of road users as well as to offering a great step forward in the development of automated mobility. Valeo is a partner in the innovation being deployed worldwide and is today the only company able to offer both a LiDAR technology with outstanding performance and a unique capability to produce automotive grade LiDAR systems at scale.”

Thanks to its laser-based system, Valeo SCALA 3 generates a 3D image of the vehicle’s surroundings delivering a point cloud of a yet unparalleled resolution for an automotive system. Boasting more than 12 million pixels per second (x48 compared with the SCALA 2) and a detection range of 200 metres for low reflectivity objects and 300 metres for high reflectivity objects, it sees objects that are invisible to the human eye.

In addition to its hardware capabilities, Valeo SCALA 3 comes with a suite of software modules, including perception and artificial intelligence-based algorithms. Its LiDAR functions guarantee unparalleled safety and reliability through blockage detection, rain and spray detection, online calibration or misalignment detection. It will be able to identify objects, such as a tire, left on an unlit black asphalt road more than 150 meters ahead with unique detection performance compared to cameras and radars. It also identifies, classifies and tracks objects, giving the car fusion system the full 3D mapping around the car, and finally making autonomous driving possible. These software modules can easily be embedded on major SoC platforms, and run on dedicated ECUs or domain controllers.

At CES 2024, to be held from January 8 to 12, Valeo will present at its booth its awards winning SCALA 3 LiDAR and, for the first time, will give visitors the opportunity to experience and learn more about its AI-based perception software and how it helps classify objects identified by the LiDAR in the Point Cloud.