Douglas Lumish, Latham & Watkins. (Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM)

A Silicon Valley manufacturer of lidar systems for autonomous driving is asserting a newly battle-tested patent against two Chinese competitors.

San Jose-based Velodyne LiDAR Inc. is accusing Hesai Photonics Technology Co. Ltd. and Suteng Innovation Technology Co. Ltd. of infringing its patented rotating devices that can be mounted on the roofs of self-driving vehicles.

Velodyne and its Latham & Watkins attorneys say the company pioneered the system of rotating laser emitters and avalanche photodiode detectors that create a 360-degree field of view of sensors. Velodyne founder David Hall patented the technology in 2011.

“Hesai took Velodyne’s revolutionary invention and incorporated it into its own competing products,” states Velodyne’s complaint against Hesai, which is signed by Latham partner Douglas Lumish. “Even worse, Hesai knew of and studied Velodyne’s products and patented technology before incorporating it into Hesai’s infringing products.”

Hesai, which is based in Shanghai, and Suteng, which is based in Shenzhen and is also known as RoboSense, did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.

Velodyne’s complaints claim that the company and Hall “changed the course of history by making autonomous vehicles a reality,” beginning with DARPA’s 2007 Urban Challenge for autonomous driving. The company provided lidar systems, which stands for light detection and ranging, for Google for a number of years, and more recently received a $150 million investment from Ford Motor Co. and Baidu.

The technology is also used in driver assistance systems and has applications in aerial mapping, robotics and industrial safety. Velodyne announced in March that it has shipped 30,000 lidar sensors worth about $500 million to some 250 customers. It is rumored to be looking to go public by the end of 2019.

Sunnyvale competitor Quanergy Systems Inc. challenged the validity of the same 7,969,558 patent last year before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. After the PTAB initiated proceedings Velodyne offered to narrow its claims. But the PTAB ultimately ruled that wasn’t necessary, finding that the commercial success and industry praise for Velodyne’s lidar showed that its invention was “revelatory and not obvious.”

“As the PTAB found, Mr. Hall’s claimed invention, as embodied in Velodyne’s HDL-64E sensor, resolved a long-felt need for a LiDAR sensor that could capture distance points rapidly in all directions and produce a sufficiently dense 3-D point cloud for use in autonomous navigation,’” Lumish writes in Tuesday’s complaints.

Velodyne accuses each of its two competitors of willfully infringing. “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,” Lumish writes in the complaint against RoboSense.

Also on the complaint are Latham partners Jeffrey Homrig, Patricia Young and Ann Marie Wahls. Latham counsel Jonathan Strang and associate Brett Sandford represented Velodyne at the PTAB.