How does a Self-driving Vehicle see using LiDAR?
Autonomous vehicles have become a recent buzz word with several companies trying to create a perfect robotaxi such as Uber, Lyft, Cruise Automation, Motional, Aurora, Aptiv, Didi Chuxing, Yandex, etc. Well, recently Uber has sold its self-driving robotaxi division to Aurora citing operating costs. But that is not deterring other starts up to bring this technology to the realization. However, many people don’t that culmination of self-driving cars dates back to the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007 where participating research teams were required to build a self-driving vehicle capable of driving in urban traffic, performing complicated maneuvers such as passing, merging, parking, and going through intersections. It was then several universities and private companies collaborated and participated
in the challenge bring the idea of autonomous vehicles to the mainstream.
Distance between objects and the LiDAR is determined by transmitted a laser pulse and measuring the time of the flight, i.e. the amount of the time it took to receive the backscattered pulse and knowing the speed of the light.
