Luminar, a company that builds vision-based lidar and machine perception technologies for autonomous vehicles, is acquiring high-performance laser manufacturer Freedom Photonics on Monday. The all-stock transaction involves Luminar selling 3 million shares of its common stock, or about $42.3 million at today's share price, per a regulatory filing. 'The deal is signed and expected to close in the second quarter, and it really brings Freedom Photonics's high-powered laser and their related photonic integrated circuit technologies to optimize the performance, as well as advance our cost roadmap, of our future sensors,' Jason Eichenholz, Luminar's co-founder and chief technology officer, told TechCrunch. Whether on city streets or highways, a major problem autonomous vehicle systems face is the ability to see and recognize objects at far distances. In order to get the point density and resolution needed to allow the AV system to determine whether it sees a tire or a person 300 meters...
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