Baraja's New Lidar Uses Rainbow Physics to Help Self-Driving Cars See

In the land of the self-driving vehicle, the car with the best lidar sensor is king. So goes the logic of the booming self-driving car industry. To drive safely, an autonomous vehicle needs to see the world around it, and the best way to do that is with a system that fires millions of pulses of light every second, measuring how long they take to bounce off nearby objects and building a detailed 3-D map. It's a young technology--the first application designed specifically for driving dates to 2005--and remains expensive and unproven when it comes to the automotive grade reliability the car industry requires. That's why dozens of lidar makers have emerged in recent years, each claiming they've got the laser-flinging solution that offers the right balance of range, resolution, robustness--and cost.