LiDAR ist eine Kerntechnologie beim Autonomen Fahren. Warum zeigt dieser Artikel.
The term “lidar” comes from mashing together “light” and “radar,” which also makes a handy way of understanding it because … well, it’s radar, but with light.
A refresher from high-school physics: Radar bounces a pulse of radio waves off an object, like a plane, to determine how far away it is, based on how long it takes for the pulse to bounce back. Lidar uses a pulse of light from a laser to do the same thing.
“You need a combination of cameras, radar, and lidar in order to create a self-driving system.”Take enough of those lasers, spin them in a circle, and you end up with a three-dimensional “point cloud” of the world around you. You’ve probably seen these rainbow-colored dots depicting cityscapes, mountains, and even Thom Yorke’s singing, disembodied head in Radiohead’s House of Cards music video. That 360-degree 3D map is like a Rosetta Stone to a self-driving car, allowing it to decipher the world around it.
“You need a combination of cameras, radar, and lidar in order to create a self-driving system,” explains Jada Tapley, VP of Advanced Engineering at Aptiv. She would know. Aptiv built the autonomous Lyft cars that ferried attendees around Las Vegas for CES 2018. In the worst gridlock the city sees all year. And monsoon-like conditions. With zero accidents.
Those cars had nine lidar, ten radar, and four cameras. A combination of all three allow it to drive itself, but lidar performs the crucial function engineers call localization. “It’s important for the vehicle to be able to identify with a very high degree of accuracy where it is on the map,” Tapley explains. “We use our lidar to do that.”While GPS can narrow down your location to a circle about 16 feet in diameter, lidar can do it within a circle four inches in diameter. That’s better than a lot of drivers can manage.
