Radar is not unfamiliar to many people, but lidar may not hear much. In recent years, with the exposure of unmanned technologies such as Google and Tesla, laser pointer radar has also received widespread attention.
Lidar, or light detection and measurement, is a system that combines laser, global positioning system (GPS), and inertial navigation system (INS) technologies to obtain data and generate accurate DEM (digital elevation model) . From the working principle, there is no fundamental difference with microwave radar, but compared with microwave radar, it has the characteristics of high resolution, good concealment, strong anti-interference ability, good low-altitude detection performance, small size and light weight.
With the continuous development and popularization of laser pointer technology, there are more and more application fields of laser radar, and it can be seen in areas such as driverless cars, drones, 3D printing, VR / AR and so on.
The application of lidar in driverless cars is not news, and lidar is also called the eyes of driverless cars. Self-driving is a very popular technology in recent years. At present, self-driving cars are smart cars that sense the road environment through the on-board sensing system, automatically plan driving routes, and control the vehicles to reach predetermined targets.
How does Lidar help cars identify intersections and directions? The technology used by lidar is flight time, which is the calculation of the relative distance between the target and itself based on the turnaround time of the laser pointer after encountering an obstacle. The laser beam can accurately measure the relative distance between the contour edge of the object in the field of view and the device. These contour information form a so-called point cloud and draw a 3D environment map with an accuracy of centimeter level, thereby improving the measurement accuracy.