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IPFS News Link • Transportation

New Lidar Chips for Self-Driving Vehicles are Smaller Than a Dime, Cost $10 to Manufacture

• https://mishtalk.com, by mishgea

Please consider the IEEE Spectrum article MIT and DARPA Pack Lidar Sensor Onto Single Chip.

Light detection and ranging, or lidar, is a sensing technology based on laser light. It's similar to radar, but can have a higher resolution, since the wavelength of light is about 100,000 times smaller than radio wavelengths. For robots, this is very important: Since radar cannot accurately image small features, a robot equipped with only a radar module would have a hard time grasping a complex object. At the moment, primary applications of lidar are autonomous vehicles and robotics, but also include terrain and ocean mapping and UAVs. Lidar systems are integral to almost all autonomous vehicles and many other robots that operate autonomously in commercial or industrial environments.

Lidar systems measure how far away each pixel in a 3D space is from the emitting device, as well as the direction to that pixel, which allows for the creation of a full 3D model of the world around the sensor. The basic method of operation of a lidar system is to transmit a beam of light, and then measure the returning signal when the light reflects off of an object. The time that the reflected signal takes to come back to the lidar module provides a direct measurement of the distance to the object.