Ouster, Inc. Monday introduced on-sensor 3D Zone Monitoring to its suite of high-performance lidar sensors and systems. The new feature enables lidar sensors to detect surrounding objects within customer-defined zones and trigger real-time alerts or actions.
The feature will be made available via a firmware update to REV7 customers. Ouster said it expects 3D Zone Monitoring to expand its addressable market, simplify customer development, and make its product usability easier than ever before.
“Introducing 3D Zone Monitoring on REV7 sensors is a major step towards becoming an autonomy company,” said Ouster CEO Angus Pacala. “This feature will immediately serve our warehouse automation and industrial customers, and we expect it to unlock additional opportunities across all our markets.”
Existing 2D industrial lidar sensors typically offer 2D zone monitoring that allows simple mobile platforms to detect and avoid obstacles. However, these sensors suffer from limited field of view and low resolution that make it difficult to detect all obstacles and enable the next generation of flexible industrial robotics.
Ouster is embedding 3D zone monitoring directly into the REV7 OS0, OS1, and OSDome sensor lineup. This allows customers to take advantage of the convenience and security of on-board zone monitoring in high-performance 3D digital lidar.
The San Francisco, Calif.-based company provides high-resolution scanning and solid-state lidar sensors and software solutions for the automotive, industrial, robotics, and smart infrastructure industries. Founded in 2015, it has offices in the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
Last year, Ouster merged with Velodyne, another lidar provider. The combined company has over 850 customers spanning the automotive, industrial, robotics and smart infrastructure industries.
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Ouster targets material-handling customers with new feature
3D Zone Monitoring’s primary functionality supports collision avoidance on moving vehicles, such as forklifts, with warnings, deceleration, and emergency stops. This feature addition is the result of significant demand from material handling customers, which will enable them to reduce the development time of collision avoidance systems while still leveraging the 3D point cloud data and freeing up software development resources and compute power for other tasks.
Key features include:
- Custom 3D Zones: Create and store up to 128 distinct 3D zones on-sensor for flexible monitoring.
- Real-Time Monitoring: Actively monitor up to 16 zones with real-time statistics.
- Configurable Filters: Reduce false positives in the presence of obscurants with tunable filters for each zone.
- Dynamic Zone Switching: Rapidly switch between active zones based on vehicle inputs such as speed and steer angle.
- Parallel Data Processing: Monitor zones and simultaneously output raw point cloud data for more complex tasks.
3D Zone Monitoring will be made available to Ouster customers using REV7 digital lidar products through its upcoming Firmware 3.2 release.
Ouster is showing off its lidar systems at ProMat 2025 this week. You can find them in Booth N7847.
