RoboSense obtains IATF 16949 Certification

RoboSense, a leading automotive LiDAR manufacturer, announced that it has obtained the IATF 16949 certificate in the automotive field, which now fully qualifies it to supply to automotive customers.

RoboSense's LiDAR production line obtained the IATF 16949 Letter of Conformity in December, which has accelerated partnerships of automotive-grade LiDAR serial productions with major OEMs and Tier 1s.

Developed by the IATF (International Automotive Task Force) and submitted to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for approval and publication, IATF 16949 is the most widely used global quality management standard for the automotive industry. In addition, the high quality management that IATF 16949 offers utilises 5 tools (APQP/FMEA/MSA/SPC/PPAP) as part of their application assessment.

Dr. LeiLei Shinohara, the Co-partner and Vice President of RoboSense, said, “IATF16949 requires extremely high production consistency, and emphasises various product reliability metrics. It recognises the RoboSense design, research and development, and production processes. It also indicates that RoboSense has achieved a new milestone of complete readiness for serial mass production of automotive LiDARs, including the latest solid-state smart LiDAR “RS-LiDAR-M1”.”

RoboSense's “125-layer equivalent” solid-state LiDAR “RS-LiDAR-M1” was officially released in January 2020 as the world's first MEMS LiDAR to obtain IATF6949 for its production line. Its production was carried out under the IATF16949 quality management system.

The product development of “RS-LiDAR-M1” followed the APQP and A-SPICE as the basis for the project management and product development process. During production, RoboSense fully implemented the IATF16949 quality management system and ISO26262 functional safety standards. By combining ISO16750 test requirement and other automotive-grade reliability specifications with these systems, the accuracy of the RS-LiDAR-M1 product can be verified.

MEMS mirror is the core component in RS-LiDAR-M1. According to the AEC-Q100 standard, combining the characteristics of MEMS micro-mirror, a total of ten verification test groups were designed, covering factors such as: temperature, humidity, packaging process, electromagnetic compatibility, mechanical vibration and shock, and aging. The cumulative test time for all test samples has now exceeded 100,000 hours. Furthermore, the longest-running prototype has been tested for more than 300 days, while the total road test mileage has exceeded 150,000 kilometres with no degradation found in various testing scenarios.

In Vienna, Austria, the RS-LiDAR-M1 was tested for rain and fog under different light and wind speed conditions. The test results prove that the RS-LiDAR-M1 has met the required standards and the final mass-produced RS-LiDAR-M1 will adapt to all climate and working conditions.

RoboSense continues to optimize the LiDAR performance in order to lead the way towards a driverless future. On September 25, 2019, RoboSense partnered with First Automobile Works (FAW), the world's leading automotive OEM, to include RS-LiDAR-M1 as a core component in FAW's proprietary next-generation autonomous driving system development. On January 8, 2020, during CES2020, RoboSense cooperated with Freetech, the leading ADAS solution provider, on the serial production of the smart multi-sensor fusion solution.