Abstract

Research and development to bring autonomous vehicles on the roads has been intensified these years. Among the various technologies currently studied, automotive lidars are a fast-growing one due to their obvious accuracy to detect a wide range of objects at distances up to a few hundreds of meters in various weather conditions. First commercialized devices for ADAS were laser scanners. Since then, new architectures have recently appeared such as solid-state hybrid and flash lidars [1,2] that offer a higher compactness, robustness and a cost reduction. Both based on time-of-flight measurements, hybrid lidars combine a 1D scan with an emission/reception in line in the other direction, while flash lidars do not even require beam scanners because only one short laser pulse with a large divergence is used to enlighten the whole scene. Depth of encountered objects can then be recovered from measurement of echoed light at once, hence enabling real-time 3D mapping of the environment.

© 2019 IEEE