LeddarTech at CES 2025
Hello and welcome to the LeddarTech Lab podcast for all things mobility, ADAS, AD and the tech and trends driving the automotive space. I’m your host, Michelle Dawn Mooney. CES is right around the corner and today we are joined by Daniel Aitken, Vice President of Global Marketing, Communications and Investor Relations and Heinz Oyrer, Director of Strategic Partnerships to talk to us and tell us what LeddarTech is bringing to the event and what new and cool things they are going to be showing visitors. Welcome gentlemen. Thank you so much for joining me. Heinz, Daniel, great to have you be here.
Daniel and Heinz: Thank you!
Michelle: Thank you. So I know we have a lot of exciting things to get to. Let’s start here. This is the eighth CES for LeddarTech. What keeps you coming back year after year?
Daniel: Well, you know, and actually it’s the eighth one for LeddarTech. I think it’s probably my 12th or 13th CES and, you know, not counting obviously the ones we lost because of COVID, but, you know, what keeps us coming back here is it really is the number one place in the world to meet customers and to meet different media and see just innovation happening around the world. And I think that as a very innovative tech company as we are, for us, it’s really the best platform for us to see customers, to see partners, as well as different folks from the media, analysts, and things like that to really give us a chance to show off who we are, what we do as a company, how proud we are of our technology, and the folks who develop it with us. So, you know, we want to demonstrate. We want to show people what we do and the exciting things that we’ve been up to in the last year.
Michelle: Yeah. And exciting things, definitely. So we have a short amount of time to cover a lot of territory, but you talked about this being the eighth CES for LeddarTech. So what is LeddarTech bringing this year that’s different from previous years? What’s new and what can visitors expect this year?
Daniel: Yeah. Okay. So I’m going to talk a little bit about just from the marketing side and what we are, what we’re going to be showing from the sort of the demonstration tools we’re going to use. I’m going to let Heinz get into more of the technical side of it. This year, we’re very happy to be back in the West Hall, which is really the automotive hall, which allows us to really be around a lot of our peers and customers in there. So it’s the vehicle technology, advanced mobility area. So much better place, I think, for us to be this year than maybe where we were last year. We come up with a new concept for our booth. It’s very open this time, very open style. We had a lot of people in last year, so we wanted to make the type of environment that was didn’t get too overwhelmed with folks and allow people to really see what we do and be able to talk to our team. We’re going to have, obviously, our international team there with folks from our R&D centers in Israel, Montreal, Toronto, as well as our business development folks from around the world will be there, and our senior management people.
We’re excited, obviously, to show off our exciting AI-based low-level sensor fusion and perception technology. Not only the software, but also the platform and the various products that we’ve developed based on that. Some new things this year in the way we’re going to demonstrate, we have our LeddarVision interactive dashboard. This is a way for people to go through on a touchscreen and really go through all our products, see how they operate in real situations, real environments, to really show how the difference between low-level fusion and object-level fusion and some of the performance levels that I think people will be excited about.
We also have something different this year in that we’re coming in with virtual reality this time. We’ve got two virtual reality pods where you can actually step into a virtual LeddarNavigator, which is our demo vehicle, and experience real-world scenarios that showcase the performance of LeddarVision. Also customers will get a chance to see even parts of Quebec City where we’re doing the demonstration where we create the VR, but you’ll be able to see the technology operating real-time in a virtual reality situation, which I think gives people a great opportunity if they’re unable to take the ride in the car, but even if they are, they can even watch that to get a good view of our LeddarVision surround, our LeddarVision front-view technology.
In addition, we’re going to have, obviously, a LeddarNavigator car will be there, so we’ll be doing live demos as we’ve done the last three CESs, so that’ll be available for customers to go out and do a real-world drive in the vehicle, see the technology and how it works. And of course, we will also have partners on the booth. Texas Instruments will be doing a demonstration on the booth along with ARM, so that’s very exciting for us as well. I’d like to give Heinz an opportunity to talk a little bit more about the technology and what we’re actually going to be showing, what could be exciting for people to see.
Heinz: Sure, Daniel. Yeah, you mentioned the LeddarNavigator. You can book a ride, so by booking a ride in the LeddarNavigator demonstration vehicle, you can really experience a live on-road LeddarVision surround. We call it LVS 2+. It’s a demonstration that you can see firsthand how our AI-driven software manages complex driving environments. And during this demo, you will observe dynamic and static 3D objects, lane markings and signs, and with an extended detection range and enhanced modeling accuracy. And these are achieved through early fusion of dual sensor modalities, and this is demonstrated on our so-called surround view 5V5R, five cameras, five radars, L2, L2 plus setup.
You mentioned Texas Instruments. With Texas Instruments, one of our key strategic partner, we will present an on-site tabletop demonstration of the mentioned LeddarVision surround. You can see that at both TI’s and LeddarTech’s booths, so it will utilize a so-called TDA4HQ1 processor. This is one of the latest silicon processor, and this efficient setup is now backed by over decades of TI’s leadership into the ADAS market, and it really demonstrates the processor’s power in sensor fusion and AI-driven ADAS and autonomous vehicle applications.
And the other key partner you mentioned is Arm, and in partnership with Arm, we will also showcase LeddarVision surround, but a little bit differently, not in the car, like on the LeddarNavigator, not on a tabletop, like with TI, in an embedded solution. Rather than we will really show it on an AWS, it’s called G5G, it’s on the cloud instance. So we are working here also indirectly with Amazon, which cloud processing becomes more and more important, and in addition to that, We can also highlight the SOAFEE integration. SOAFEE, a consortium, offers an open, standards-based framework that facilitates cloud-native software development for mixed-critical workloads, extending from cloud environments to the automotive edge.
The so-called SOAFEE-enabled version of LeddarVision facilitates convenient and scalable development and testing of ADAS and AD functionalities, and SOAFEE standardized cloud usage within the automotive industry. So it’s simplifying early development and testing processes, particularly when target hardware is unavailable, and when scaling test efforts is necessary. So it’s now available in the cloud, LeddarVision here supports full ADAS-AD testing as software in the loop, and making it really ideal for developing and refining here perception alongside other ADAS software components.
Michelle: A lot of exciting things happening there, I can’t think of one person listening right now who won’t want to be there and see all of it in person. So Heinz, can you explain to our listeners the partnership, as you mentioned, between LeddarTech, ARM and Texas Instruments and what it’s working towards?
Heinz: Sure, well, the partnership between LeddarTech, ARM and Texas Instruments, maybe later on I call it just TI, as everybody is doing, are really central to our strategy in advancing the capabilities of autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. At LeddarTech, as was mentioned already by Daniel and also by myself, we specialize in sensor fusion and perception technology, which integrates multiple sensor inputs, such as LiDAR cameras and radars, currently mainly camera and radar.
And this goes into a cohesive system for higher accuracy and reliability, and our collaboration with ARM, which is a leader in semiconductor architecture, help us really to leverage the powerful processing solutions to run our advanced algorithms efficiently. This enables scalable, cost-efficient solutions for various automotive applications.
With Texas Instruments, as one of our other key partners, these guys are providing essential hardware, including highly optimized processors, and that powers our sensor fusion and perception systems. Together, we are currently developing an integrated solution that reduces the complexity of implementing autonomous driving technologies, and therefore helping OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers bring safety advanced features to market faster and more affordable. These collaborations also open the door for innovative solutions in areas like low-level sensor fusion and AI-based perception, where we are seeing incredible progress this year.
So ultimately, this partnership is about creating a seamless ecosystem that enhance vehicle safety, supports automation, and helps drive the industry towards fully autonomous driving solutions. Our combined expertise allows us now to address the most challenging aspects of ADAS and autonomous driving, accelerating the deployment of these technologies in the automotive market.
Michelle: And I like accelerating, pun intended, because it works both ways, right? Great to hear a group of industry leaders, each with their specific expertise, coming together to push the technological envelope. It’s great. So users will be able to see the technology in action at demo booths and demo rides, as we’ve been alluding to. It sounds amazing. Daniel, can you talk a little bit more about that?
Daniel: Yeah, you’re right, Michelle. You know what? The booth at CES, anybody’s booth at CES, what you want to do is you want to attract customers to come and see your technology. You know, what we learn over time is, as CES becomes bigger and bigger, and even geographically becomes larger in Vegas, people’s time is very, very tight. So what’s important to us as a company is finding ways that we can provide opportunities for customers to come and see what we do as quickly as possible, and get the right tool for them to be able to see it, rather than, you know, trying to get people in our booth for an hour or two hours, that’s really tough. So what we’ve done, as I said, we have our touch screen, so you can come in and just learn about the technology with one of our experts. You can do the virtual reality. If you don’t have time to do a demo or in the vehicle, or as just a starter to learn about our technology more, do the virtual reality booth, so you can run through that, you can see what it looks like. You’ll really see the difference on the detection and the safety protocols that come into play there, and certainly the high performance that we’re able to do. And then, of course, you know, you can take a ride in our LeddarNavigator.
And we just completed, actually, a whole European tour with our European LeddarNavigator, where our team took it all through Germany, and Italy, my gosh, France, everywhere in Europe, and we did a record number of demo rides with different customers, OEMs and tier ones in Europe. We did the same thing in China, so I think, you know, people will be very excited to get an opportunity to get in the vehicle, and we’re giving opportunities, too, on our website for people to pre-book those demo rides, because it does book up quickly, and also people’s schedules book up quickly at CES. So we really want to be able to give people every opportunity to come in, see what we do, and especially meet our partners.
You know, I mean, it’s, you know, what Heinz spoke about when it comes to Arm and Amazon and AWS and TI, you know, these are three major global players who really recognize what LeddarTech does and believe in us, and we’re very excited to be partnering with them and for them also to be at our booth this year. So it’s a great opportunity for people to come and see how LeddarTech works when, you know, we definitely don’t work as an island. We understand it’s important that bringing collaborators, bringing other people who bring other things that benefit the customer.
Our mission is to make roads safer, right, is to reduce accidents and make life better for drivers, for passengers, or pedestrians, and make cities safer. To do that, you need to bring in multiple partners who have different skill sets, who have different innovations they bring forward, and that we can work together with to get our product to market quicker and really, I think, enable our vision to come through faster, which is to make roads safer and make things better for drivers and vehicle users and vulnerable street users as well. And so, yeah, we have lots of opportunities for people to come and see things at our booth. So you say it’s exciting. I can’t. I’m very excited. I’m talking too much about it, but very excited about what we’re going to have. Really entice people to come and see us, meet with us, check things out.
Heinz: Yeah, probably a good buzzword, meet with us. Of course, everybody’s welcome to stop by, pass by. However, for those wanting to experience our technology in action, meaning driving in the LeddarNavigator, so we are offering a truly immersive real-time demo in this car. So again, this is not just about simulation. It’s a live, on-the-road showcase right in Las Vegas. So where visitors can really experience our sensor fusion and perception technology as it operates in real world conditions. So spots for these demo rides are limited. It’s also, you can imagine, a big organizational challenge and then spots may fill up quickly. So we would appreciate and recommend booking early. So the earlier you book, the better we can manage, the better we can organize, the better experience we can give you.
And yeah, you can reserve your spot directly on our CES2025 webpage at leddartech.com, or if you prefer to book through your point of contact at LeddarTech, assuming you have one or a couple of them, also feel free to do that directly through those guys. So just make sure you don’t miss anything out. We are more than happy and more than excited to welcoming you soon. It’s just a few weeks. Yeah, we have November, yeah, six weeks maybe, and then we’re there.
Michelle: Time’s flying. And to Daniel’s point, there’s so much to see too, you know, and Heinz saying to get your reservations in there early because you don’t want to miss out on all the fun. And also to your point, Heinz, you know, at the end of the day, this is all exciting and really cool things happening. But I love how you mentioned the why-at the heart of the matter. I mean, this is business, obviously, but why is this all coming together to make the road safer? And I think that’s really important for people to hear. It’s going to be exciting. It’s going to look pretty and shiny and going to be some fun stuff there. But such an amazing goal at the end of all of this.
So as we are almost out of time here, any last words, who should visit the LeddarTech booth and where can they find you at CES?
Daniel: Right. Well, firstly, Michelle, thank you very much for having us on today. We much appreciate it. We really look forward to people come meet us. We’re going to be in the LVCC West Hall booth 6752. We invite OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers in the automotive space, industry partners, of course, journalists, anyone who’s interested to come and see us. As Heinz mentioned, you can also check out our special CES 2025 web page to book an appointment early to meet a member of our team or to arrange a live demo on our LeddarNavigator. We want to wish everybody a very happy holiday season. And we’re very excited to start off January in Las Vegas, meeting our customers, new customers and anyone else who’s interested in technology to come and see LeddarTech LVCC West booth 6752. Thank you.
Wonderful. Daniel Aiken, Vice President of Global Marketing Communications and Investor Relations and Heinz Oyrer, Director of Strategic Partnerships from LeddarTech. Thank you so much for your time. I am excited for you. And once again, we’ll have all the information in our show notes as well. So go out to CES and make sure you say hi to Daniel and Heinz there and visit the booth because some exciting things await. Thank you so much for sharing this and good luck and congratulations on all of it. Can’t wait.
Daniel and Heinz: Thank you.
Michelle: And I want to thank all of you for tuning in and listening to the LeddarTech Labs podcast. Of course, you can subscribe to the podcast to hear more engaging conversations like the one you heard today. I’m your host, Michelle Dawn Mooney. Thanks again for joining us. We hope to connect with you on another podcast soon.
