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Main Authors: Piggott, Alexander Y., Jiang, Cathy Yunshan, Lam, John, Gassend, Blaise, Verghese, Simon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09736
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author Piggott, Alexander Y.
Jiang, Cathy Yunshan
Lam, John
Gassend, Blaise
Verghese, Simon
author_facet Piggott, Alexander Y.
Jiang, Cathy Yunshan
Lam, John
Gassend, Blaise
Verghese, Simon
contents Coherent lidars promise a number of advantages over traditional time-of-flight lidars for autonomous vehicles. These include the direct measurement of target approach velocities via the Doppler effect, and near-immunity to interference from other lidars and sunlight. Furthermore, coherent lidars are compatible with a variety of solid-state beam steering technologies such as optical phased arrays, which may enable low-cost and compact lidars. In this manuscript, we discuss the headwinds facing the adoption of coherent lidar for autonomous ride-hailing vehicles and how they can be addressed. On the optics side, we explore how one can achieve the points per second and fields of view required for autonomous vehicles, and the resulting laser power requirements. We then discuss how these power levels could be achieved by co-packaging high-power semiconductor lasers and amplifiers with photonic integrated circuits, the preferred approach for low-cost coherent lidars. On the signal processing side, we discuss how to robustly disambiguate multiple returns in realistic environments and affordably meet the compute requirements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_09736
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Coherent lidar for ride-hailing autonomous vehicles
Piggott, Alexander Y.
Jiang, Cathy Yunshan
Lam, John
Gassend, Blaise
Verghese, Simon
Optics
Coherent lidars promise a number of advantages over traditional time-of-flight lidars for autonomous vehicles. These include the direct measurement of target approach velocities via the Doppler effect, and near-immunity to interference from other lidars and sunlight. Furthermore, coherent lidars are compatible with a variety of solid-state beam steering technologies such as optical phased arrays, which may enable low-cost and compact lidars. In this manuscript, we discuss the headwinds facing the adoption of coherent lidar for autonomous ride-hailing vehicles and how they can be addressed. On the optics side, we explore how one can achieve the points per second and fields of view required for autonomous vehicles, and the resulting laser power requirements. We then discuss how these power levels could be achieved by co-packaging high-power semiconductor lasers and amplifiers with photonic integrated circuits, the preferred approach for low-cost coherent lidars. On the signal processing side, we discuss how to robustly disambiguate multiple returns in realistic environments and affordably meet the compute requirements.
title Coherent lidar for ride-hailing autonomous vehicles
topic Optics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09736