Lidar moves into warehouses

Lidar works like a laser tape measure that fires light pulses and maps distance in 3D, and Ouster is pushing that sensor deeper into warehouses and factory floors. (investors.ouster.com) Ouster said on March 17, 2025 that it added “3D Zone Monitoring” directly into its REV7 OS0, OS1 and OSDome sensors, letting the lidar itself watch defined areas and trigger warnings, slowdowns, or emergency stops. The company said the feature targets moving industrial vehicles such as forklifts. (lidarmag.com) The company said customers can store up to 128 three-dimensional zones on a sensor and actively monitor 16 of them in real time. Ouster said material-handling customers pushed for the feature to cut software work and free up onboard computing for other tasks. (lidarmag.com) Warehouse robots need to move around pallets, racks, forklifts, and people in spaces that change by the hour. Ouster said older 2D industrial lidar systems have narrower views and lower resolution, which can miss obstacles that a 3D point cloud can capture. (lidarmag.com) That shift has been showing up in Ouster’s business. In its November 7, 2024 earnings report, Chief Executive Angus Pacala said robotics and smart infrastructure deals were the company’s largest wins in the quarter, and the company said third-quarter revenue was driven mainly by robotics and smart infrastructure customers. (investors.ouster.com) By March 20, 2025, Ouster said full-year revenue had reached $111 million, up 33% from 2023, with more than 17,300 sensors shipped for revenue. The company also said software-attached bookings rose more than 60% in 2024 and that Gemini and BlueCity deployments expanded to more than 700 sites. (investors.ouster.com) Ouster has been laying the warehouse case for years. In January 2022, it signed a strategic agreement with Vecna Robotics that included a non-binding forecast for about 3,000 sensors through 2025 for self-driving pallet trucks, tow tractors, and lift trucks. (businesswire.com) Vecna said at the time that it chose Ouster’s OS0 after evaluating 3D lidar sensors on the market, and Ouster said the sensor would help vehicles detect obstacles while working alongside human operators and manually driven vehicles. (businesswire.com) Ouster also partnered with Mov.ai in 2022 around autonomous mobile robots, or warehouse carts that drive themselves, using lidar for simultaneous localization and mapping, obstacle avoidance, and risk mitigation. The company said those systems were aimed at “chaotic warehouse” environments where routes and obstacles change constantly. (ouster.com) The company is now framing that push more broadly than cars. On its investor site this month, Ouster said lidar is “best known” for autonomous vehicles but argued it will become a common sensing tool for autonomous machines and infrastructure, and said it now serves industrial, robotics, automotive, and smart infrastructure markets. (investors.ouster.com) The bet is that warehouse operators will buy more perception out of the box, not just another sensor. If that happens, lidar’s next big market may be the loading dock instead of the highway. (investors.ouster.com, lidarmag.com)