Under the skin: How HD radar may advance self-driving vehicles
Things that most people can take for granted, such as the elevation of an object (for example, a car on the ground compared with a bridge or gantry overhead) isn’t so straightforward for some sensing systems.
The idea is that fully autonomous cars will need a fusion of data from different sensors, like radar, cameras and lidar. It’s the last of these that presents an issue, because it’s still a very expensive technology. Lidar is a kind of laser-based radar (light detection and ranging, as opposed to radio detection and ranging), and a lidar unit contains arrays of sensors that enable it to build a detailed picture as a ‘point cloud’.