What Self-Driving Cars See
By JOHN R. QUAIN MAY 25, 2017
Giant tech companies are fighting over the technology in court. Start-ups around the world are racing to develop new versions of it. And engineers say it is essential to making autonomous cars safe.
The obscure object of desire: lidar.
“We believe it will be the basis for autonomous driving,” said Guillaume Devauchelle, who oversees innovation at Valeo, a major parts supplier to automakers.
The technology, which uses near-infrared light to detect the shape of objects around it, is the centerpiece of an intense court fight in California between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving business operated by Google’s parent, Alphabet. In the case, Waymo accuses a former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, of stealing trade secrets about the company’s lidar designs for his own autonomous driving start-up — which he sold to Uber for nearly $700 million.
Lidar — pronounced LIE-dar — is shorthand for light detection and ranging. It is a type of sensor that is at the heart of many autonomous car designs and is critical to several worldwide high-resolution mapping efforts. The same technology is used to delineate terrain from airplanes and detect speeding violations.
The advantage of lidar is that it can generate precise three-dimensional images of everything from cars to trees to cyclists in a variety of environments and under a variety of lighting conditions. While autonomous car designs use numerous sensors, including ultrasonic, radar and video camera components, lidar has unique abilities. Unlike cameras, for example, lidar cannot be fooled by shadows or blinded by bright sunlight.