Optical sensors, spectral detection and LiDAR.
Hesai held the global launch of Kosmo at its Maxwell super factory in Shanghai on October 14, unveiling a 3D world data engine and disclosing that it has entered robotic motion modules and begun commercial deliveries. Li Yifan said that LiDAR units that once sold for more than RMB 300,000 can now be produced for around USD 200, with one unit rolling off the line every five to six seconds.
A team led by the University of Central Florida (UCF) will receive a five-year, $19.2 million grant from the US Army Research Office to study light propagation and control in complex dynamic environments. The project, led by Guifang Li, will explore weak backscattering coherent measurement, inverse methods, AI analysis and multi-plane light conversion, with the goal of measuring and rapidly correcting optical field distortions when remote sensors or beacons cannot be placed. Potential applications include directed-energy systems, biological tissue imaging, laser medicine, remote sensing and free-space optical communications.
The article analyzes the computing demands of the vision-only and LiDAR fusion approaches in autonomous driving, arguing that compute requirements are not simply determined by the number of sensors, but by how the perception scheme processes data and its algorithm architecture.
Wuhan Yuanxi Photonics has closed an angel funding round worth tens of millions of yuan, with investors including CASSTAR and Hongshan Capital. Founded in late 2025, the company will focus on metasurface optical chip R&D and product introduction, targeting two major markets: intelligent 3D sensing and data center optical interconnects.
Data from NE Times show that 525,500 LiDAR units were installed in passenger vehicles in China in August 2026. Hesai installed 182,436 units, just 65 fewer than Huawei, with the two companies together accounting for 69.4%. The growth logic is extending beyond simply adding vehicle models to multiple LiDARs per vehicle, robotic perception and 3D spatial mapping.
Why we recommend it: The original article provides monthly installation and market share data, helping to gauge the automotive LiDAR market landscape
Hesai, Seyond and RoboSense released their financial reports in succession in August. Comparing the three, the article notes that as production vehicle models, robotics and embodied AI generate real demand, the growth logic of leading LiDAR companies is beginning to diverge.
RoboSense plans to sell its complete embodied-robot business for RMB 59.878 million and focus on supplying key components to robot makers; Seyond has signed a design win with Chuneng Auto for its forward-facing main LiDAR; Hesai has also announced a new move in spatial intelligence.
In the first half of 2026, RoboSense shipped 719,200 units, up 169.6% year on year, while Seyond shipped 450,900 units, up 364.8%. The article compares the scale, profitability and second growth curves of the three companies.
LiDAR installations totaled 1.595 million units in 2024 and 3.316 million in 2025; 2.282 million units were installed in the first half of 2026, with Huawei's 896-beam becoming the new benchmark.
A team led by researcher Li Shaojuan at the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics built a visual-olfactory bimodal neuromorphic device based on a MoS2/SnS2 floating-gate heterostructure. It responds to both optical and gas signals and fuses them at the device level; the results were published in Advanced Materials. The device has an active area of 148 µm² and static power consumption of 3.4 µW. Adding the optical modality raised classification accuracy for 12 gases from 52.24% to 98.27%, while recognition accuracy for 51 gas mixtures reached 89.32%.
O-Film and Luming Photonics are deepening their collaboration to scale up all-solid-state LiDAR based on the ADS6311 SPAD chip.
Guangzai Technology, a company incubated by HIOM, collaborated with the University of Cambridge, Southeast University and others to publish a paper in Sustainable Cities and Society proposing SCE-Model, a spatiotemporal carbon emission model optimized with machine learning and validated by LiDAR. Model outputs showed strong agreement with coherent differential absorption LiDAR observations (R² = 0.79; ±5 ppm), enabling hourly, block-level carbon emission mapping.
Guangdong Telecom, Sun Yat-sen University and the Su Bingtian Speed Research and Training Center, among others, used integrated sensing and communications equipment and a digital twin system from Liutong Photonics, a company incubated by the Hangzhou Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, to build a digital track based on communication optical fiber and a smart transportation demonstration project around the venue. The system captures vibration signals through hundreds of meters of fiber laid beneath the track and uses AI algorithms to calculate parameters such as stride length and ground contact time; the traffic sensing network extracts vehicle speeds, trajectories and traffic density from urban communication fiber cables.
During Typhoon "Wutip," Liutong Photonics used the SC-DAS-1550-FA integrated sensing and communications device to turn the submarine communication cable of the Guishan Offshore Wind Farm into a distributed acoustic sensor array, monitoring in real time ocean waves and currents, as well as impacts, vibrations, and deformation of wind turbine foundations, tower sections, and submarine cables.