About AEye
What does a fighter jet have to do with autonomous vehicles?
AEye’s technology has evolved from AEye CEO Luis Dussan’s work in designing surveillance, reconnaissance, and defense systems for fighter jets.
In order to deliver military-grade performance in autonomous cars, Luis assembled a world-class team of technical experts and thought leaders from leading military institutions and technology companies.
A fighter jet must see a target before the target sees it.
Key Principles
With critical missions and pilots’ lives at stake, three principles shaped the perception systems on these military aircraft:
- Never miss anything
- Understand that objects are not created equally and require different attention
- Do everything in real time
AEye CEO Luis Dussan realized that any robot, especially a self-driving vehicle, faces a similar challenge.
Simply put, a car must be able to see, classify, and respond to an object—whether it is a parked car or a child crossing the street—in real time and before it’s too late.
Taking a completely fresh approach to artificial perception, the AEye team determined that a vehicle’s ability to scan the surroundings and quickly identify critical objects demanded that it perceive like a person, but think like a robot.
Mimicking human perception required pushing intelligence and processing to the edge of the network, creating an integrated perception system that brought together software extensibility, artificial intelligence, and smart, agile sensors.
This led to the creation of AEye’s iDAR, the world’s first solid state, leading-edge artificial perception platform for autonomous vehicles.
Three Steps in Human Perception
Next time you are looking for someone in a crowd, think about the steps you take.
You will see that you go through three steps of perception: Search, Acquisition, and—once you find the person—Tracking.
Search
Search. Your eyes search the crowd looking for a familiar pattern that resembles your friend.
Acquire
Acquire. You identify the familiar pattern and visually confirm that this is your friend.
Track
Track. Once you have identified your friend, you track their movements in the crowd.
These basic steps of perception are replicated in iDAR. Unlike current approaches that attempt to accomplish these steps by centrally processing data from a variety of passive sensors, iDAR does this by making sensors smarter.
iDAR is modeled on the human visual cortex and uniquely mimics the unsurpassed information-synthesis capability of the human brain by pushing intelligence and processing to the edge of the sensor network.
Management Team
Luis Dussan
Blair LaCorte
Dr. Barry Behnken
Ransom Wuller
Dr. Allan Steinhardt
John Stockton
Aravind Ratnam
Jim Robnett
Stephen Lambright
Nate Ramanathan
Advisory Board
AEye's Advisory Board – from left to right: Tim Shiple, Luke Schneider, Willie Gault, Adrian Kaehler, Admiral David Bill, Scott Pfotenhauer, David Gardner, Greg Hitchan, James Doty, and Elliot Garbus.
Major Investors
