A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

Lidar has proven to be a capable technology for level 4 autonomous driving, and is already used in self driving taxis by Waymo and Cruise. But the spinning lidar domes on top of these cars cost thousands of dollars, and that number needs to drop by at least an order of magnitude.

Lidar stands for Light Detection and Ranging and is a method where infrared laser light is used to measure the distance to a remote object. This technology is not new. For years, it has been used for imaging vegetation, urban terrain, hidden archeological sites, building construction and recently, in augmented reality. Its particular superpower is that it can generate high resolution images of its surroundings much better than radar can. While lidar and radar are fundamentally similar in operation, the use of shorter wavelengths (lasers) compared to radar (microwaves) gives it the ability to generate highly detailed images.

In last week’s article, we looked at the camera versus lidar debate for self driving cars. If you missed that, you can read it below.

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