Lidars for vehicles: from the requirements to the design catalog

Zhuoqun Dai^*, Yang Li, Alexander Wolf, Roland Lachmayer

Institute of Product Development, Leibniz University Hannover, Hannover, Germany

*Contact email address: dai@ipeg.uni-hannover.de

Abstract—ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) is a collective term of sensors and devices on the vehicle, aiming to improve traffic safety and realize high-level autonomous driving. The Lidar systems are considered an indispensable part of ADAS to complement the other sensors like Camera and Radar. It realizes these complements by providing a real-time refreshed high-resolution 3D representation of the environment of the vehicle, in which the positional information of each object area is included so that obstacles and potential hazards can be detected in advance by the ADAS. For this purpose, a Lidar must have the reliability of continuous work and accuracy of the information provided. In this paper, the requirements of Lidar systems in the ADAS are firstly figured out by comparing it with other sensors applied on the vehicle. After that, different types for Lidar systems regarding traffic safety and driver assistance are sorted out and presented according to the stated Lidar function and driving condition on the road. Apart from the requirements, different working principles of Lidar products on the market are reviewed according to their scanning methods and specific used components in this paper. Furthermore, based on the introduction and the review, a design catalog is presented to show the probability of a Lidar design with respect to the function and requirements of vehicle applications.

Keyword: ADAS; autonomous driving; Lidar; requirements; review; design catalog