The LiDAR hop-on-hop-off route: visiting the LiDARs past, present, and future landscapes

Abstract

LiDAR technology is bounded with great expectations. This is a result of the high market prospects from several industries (notably the automotive) as well as LiDAR being a key enabling technology for automation. We will drive along the current two main avenues of LiDAR, targeted to autonomous driving. We will stop at minute technicalities of LiDAR implementations. However, occasionally we will also rise high, to get an eagle-eye view of the bigger picture. We discuss why there will not happen a one-single-expensive-LiDAR-fits-all-scenarios and why a several-cheap-complementary-LiDARs alternative is more rational. We discuss several aspects in which LiDAR changed our understanding of the landscape as well as the high impact it will have in society (economic and quality of life). Automotive LiDAR comes in an age where the societal focus is changing from private ownership to pay-as-you-use-services, and where personal responsibility will be gradually replaced by corporate liability. We will introduce some minor contributions from the Physics Centre of Minho and Porto Universities (mutual interference between commercial sensors; data processing in timing the back scattered LiDAR signal). And by the end of the route, we drop off the partaker to explore uncharted territory on its own.