Velodyne Lidar announced the company has acquired Bluecity, a Montreal-based artificial intelligence (AI) software company that provides next-generation, lidar-based solutions that solve safety, traffic and infrastructure issues. The acquisition reinforces Velodyne’s commitment to delivering AI-powered autonomous vision solutions. Velodyne and Bluecity have been working together as partners for multiple years delivering lidar-based solutions for smart city applications: Velodyne’s Intelligent Infrastructure Solution (IIS) for example combines the company’s lidar sensors and Bluecity’s AI software.
Analyzing traffic using lidar technology
ISS is an answer to legacy technology and infrastructure found in today’s infrastructure. It allows precise traffic monitoring creating a 3D map using lidar sensors, that is fed to Bluecity’s perception software that detects all vulnerable road users and modes of transportation.
All raw traffic data is processed in real-time in an NVIDIA AGX Edgebox, after which metadata is sent up to the cloud where it is presented in a dashboard across a myriad of different analytics, including near-miss detection, red light runner, green allocation and more. Raw traffic data is provided as insightful metrics such as pedestrians, cyclists, cars, trucks, and buses count, as well as road users per direction and approach, speed analytics and crosswalk occupancy. By delivering traffic monitoring and analytics to improve road safety and efficiency, ISS helps cities plan for smarter, greener transportation systems. The solution is currently deployed across four continents with 74 installations.
Delivering robust AI and analytics software as a SaaS model
The acquisition of Bluecity AI affirms that a system solutions approach integrating software and hardware is a major competitive advantage for Velodyne across all end markets. Velodyne will continue to expand its Intelligent Infrastructure Solution’s capabilities, including monitoring flows of people and vehicles to create a range of new full-stack infrastructure solutions for applications such as parking, retail, casinos and stadiums.
To serve these growing markets, Velodyne will integrate Bluecity’s robust AI and analytics software, delivered in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, with Velodyne’s Vella lidar perception software. This integration will facilitate the creation of new Velodyne lidar-based software solutions for industrial, robotics and intelligent infrastructure, enabling the acceleration of customers’ time to market with autonomous vision systems for these markets.
Vella software translates lidar data into actionable information so that autonomous systems can observe and understand the environments they are operating in. Vella’s real-time data enables autonomous systems to make decisions and take action, such as a robot or vehicle moving safely, and provide analytics, for example a traffic solution helping communities understand root causes of near-miss collisions, red light running and other road user behavior.
