Self-driving cars and lidar

Abstract

Before graduating from X as Waymo, Google's self-driving car project had been using custom lidars for several years. In their latest revision, the lidars are designed to meet the challenging requirements we discovered in autonomously driving 2 million highly-telemetered miles on public roads. Our goal is to approach price points required for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) while meeting the performance needed for safe self-driving. This talk will review some history of the project and describe a few use-cases for lidars on Waymo cars. Out of that will emerge key differences between lidars for self-driving and traditional applications (e.g. mapping) which may provide opportunities for semiconductor lasers.