lidar

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a remote sensing technology that measures distances by emitting pulsed laser light and measuring the time of flight of the reflected pulses to calculate the precise range to objects — analogous to radar but using light rather than radio waves, enabling much higher spatial resolution; in robotics and autonomous vehicles, lidar sensors produce three-dimensional point clouds of the surrounding environment by sweeping laser beams across a wide field of view, providing rich geometric information about the positions and shapes of obstacles, roads, buildings, and other scene elements at ranges of tens to hundreds of metres; mechanical rotating lidar units — such as the Velodyne HDL-64 used in early self-driving vehicles — spin a stack of laser-detector pairs to generate 360-degree coverage; solid-state lidar using MEMS mirrors or optical phased arrays offers smaller, cheaper units with no moving parts; lidar is a key enabling technology for autonomous vehicles, aerial mapping, forestry inventory, and facility inspection

Examples

• The autonomous vehicle's lidar produced 1.3 million data points per second, enabling the perception system to detect pedestrians at 80 metres.
• Airborne lidar surveys of tropical forests can penetrate the canopy and map the ground surface beneath, revealing ancient archaeological structures invisible to conventional aerial photography.

Spelled lidar or LiDAR in both American and British English; the all-caps LIDAR is also used as an acronym for Light Detection And Ranging

Synonyms: LiDAR, laser scanner