My marketing communications colleague has another new client from outside my usual comfort zone. The autonomous mobile robot (AMR) continues to grow becoming more valuable not only for warehousing, but also for manufacturing. One of the more costly components is the 3D LiDAR sensor.
She introduced me to Sonair. This Norwegian technology company has closed a new funding round, led by Skyfall Ventures. The investment introduces a completely new category of sensors said to transform a mobile robot’s spatial awareness from 2D to 3D, offering a significantly improved safety performance over traditional vision systems while cutting costs by 50-80%. The company’s Early Access Program now counts AMR manufacturers, automakers, and distributors from across the world. This technology uses ultrasound for 3D spatial awareness.
A typical 2D LiDAR scanner in an AMR only sees a person’s legs in one horizontal plane. In contrast, Sonair’s patented ADAR (Acoustic Ranging and Detection) technology detects people and objects in 3D, with low energy and computational requirements.
Sonair has now raised a total of $6.8M with Skyfall Ventures leading the latest $1.6M round. RunwayFBU, another early-stage VC fund, also contributed to the round.
Ultrasonic sensors are less affected by environmental factors such as poor lighting, dust, or changing temperatures, ensuring reliable performance in diverse conditions where traditional sensors may fail. Sonair’s sensor can also detect reflective or see-through surfaces such as glass or mirrors without difficulty. Benefits recently recognized at the international Sensors Converge event in Santa Clara, California in June this year, where Sonair won the Best of Sensors Award 2024 in the Automotive & Autonomous sensor category.
The patented ADAR technology has been in development at the world-renowned MiNaLab sensor and nanotechnology research center in Norway for more than twenty years. The imaging method is called beamforming; it’s the backbone of processing for sonar and radar, as well as in ultrasound imaging known in medicine but now used in the air.
By combining wavelength-matched transducers with cutting-edge software for beamforming and object-recognition algorithms, Sonair makes 3D spatial information available simply by transmitting sound and listening. This allows mobile robots to detect distance and direction to all objects in a 180×180 field of view with a range of up to 5 meters, providing a wider field of view than existing technologies, while also detecting obstacles above and below the 2D plane of the LiDAR.
