Self-driving LiDAR firm accuses Chinese rivals of stealing tech
Velodyne Lidar, a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) tech company that works on self-driving car programmes, has taken two Chinese companies to court over IP theft.
In two lawsuits filed at the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday, August 13, Silicon Valley-based Velodyne Lidar accused Robosense and Hesai Photonics Technology of taking its “revolutionary invention” and incorporating it into their own competing products.
Velodyne, which has partnered with Mercedes-Benz, Ford and Google in the past, develops LiDAR technology, a radar-like sensor technology that uses lasers instead of radio waves.
The claims both opened with: “Velodyne is a pioneer and a classic American success story. Its history reads like a Hollywood script describing how one man’s genius and moxie changed the world.”
Robosense and Hesai are allegedly infringing patents covering Velodyne’s 3-D LiDAR sensors, rotating devices that are mounted on the roofs of autonomous vehicles. The sensors generate a dense “3-D point cloud” with a 360-degree field of view, which the vehicle can use to “see”.
In 2011, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted US patent number 7,969,558, called “High definition LiDAR system” and covering the invention, to Hall.
The claims added: “Also at [the complaint’s] heart is the threat posed to that success by those ... who have taken Velodyne’s revolutionary invention, incorporated it into their competing products, and are injecting those infringing products into the US market.”
Both claims alleged that the Chinese companies had inspected and performed a tear-down of Velodyne’s products.
In the Robosense complaint, Velodyne alleged: “Robosense knew of and studied Velodyne’s products and patented technology before it incorporated that technology into its own products, as its personnel admitted in public interviews. Foreign counterparts of the ‘558 patent were also cited in a Robosense foreign patent application (CN105824029A).”
Velodyne also alleged that Hesai filed a patent application (CN206223978) that cited the ‘558 patent in its specification, while foreign counterparts of the ‘558 patent were also cited in a Robosense foreign patent application.
The Silicon Valley company has asked the court to stop both companies from selling the allegedly infringing products and for enhanced damages.
This isn’t the first time that Chinese actors have been accused of stealing autonomous vehicle technology from US firms.
In January this year, the FBI accused Apple employee Jizhong Chen of attempting to steal trade secrets related to the company’s self-driving car project.
Apple had hired the employee in June 2018 to work on its secretive self-driving car project. But another Apple employee reported that they saw Chen taking “suspicious, wide-angled” photographs within the Apple workspace.
After learning that Chen had applied for two external jobs, one of which was at a Chinese autonomous vehicle company, Apple suspended Chen. Following this, the FBI filed criminal charges.
In July last year, the FBI also filed criminal charges against Xiaolang Zhang, who worked at Apple for three years before announcing his return to China to work for an autonomous vehicle startup.
Mark Qiu, chief operating officer and co-founder of RoboSense, told WIPR that the company will actively respond and follow the standard legal process, and will respect the final judgment.
Qiu added: “This lawsuit is targeted at a small number of our products in the US market only and RoboSense’s global strategy will continue as originally planned.”
He added that RoboSense has more than 400 patents worldwide and that its independently developed LiDAR technology has always been the top priority of the company’s global strategy.
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