TESLA CEO Elon Musk is skeptical of putting lidar sensors on vehicles, but a growing number of his competitors are quietly adding the technology to their lineup.

For those new to the topic, lidar, short for light detection and ranging, is a sensor technology that sends out laser pulses, then measures the time it takes for them to bounce off an object and return. The data are used to calculate how far away things are and create a three-dimensional map of the objects in an area.

Lidar’s ability to map surroundings as well as measure object velocity makes it a good complementary sensor in partially or fully autonomous vehicles. Lidars are unique in that they offer long and wide visual ranges.

Falling costs and a boom in supply are driving greater adoption — there are now over 150 lidar producers globally and there have been a spate of recent public listings, by Velodyne, Luminar and Innoviz, among others.

Lidar is commonly used today by the companies that are trying to build mobility services using fully self-driving vehicles, such as Waymo and Cruise. For example, Waymo vehicles operating in California and Arizona typically have five lidar sensors to help build a wide field of view.

Musk likes to point out that humans don’t come equipped with lidar and can still drive. He uses this analogy to defend his company’s attempt to develop self-driving software algorithms capable of autonomous driving based on vision.

However, this hasn’t stopped parts of the industry from taking up the technology (even Tesla may be trialing it). Lidar usage is now spreading beyond specialized vehicles and into more run-of-the mill safety features like lane-keeping assistance and automatic emergency braking.

In industry parlance, these are advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS, and are quite separate from autonomous vehicles. The additional sensor input can help improve reaction times and accuracy for these features, but of course there are hardware costs to adding it.

As of January, 17 automakers globally have announced a total of 21 lidar-equipped passenger car models, either in production or coming soon. This number will increase as systems like General Motors’ lidar-based Ultra Cruise are added to specific models.

Some car companies are adding lidar on their vehicles even if their current software isn’t making full use of the capability. The idea is that future iterations of driving software will be able to tap into the sensors without physical upgrades to the vehicle being required.

(SD-Agencies)