Portable Laser Range Finder Enables Real-Time 3-D Mapping

Scientific American ------ Major automakers—along with upstarts such as Tesla and Uber—are racing to put self-driving cars on the road, leading to advances in enabling technologies such as laser range finders known as lidars. A lidar works like a hyperactive laser measure, scattering laser light in multiple directions to gather hundreds of thousands of measurements per second and build up a “point cloud” of spatial information. A computer processes these data to form a coherent picture of a vehicle's surroundings. To learn more click on the picture below to read the article.