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Hardware

1. LiDAR

Light Detection And Ranging

Yields point cloud

Parameters:

  • FOV (Field of View) (horizontal, vertical, ...)
  • Angle resolution
  • Spinning rate: e.g. 5-20Hz

Applications:

  • Mapping?
  • Perception
  • Localization

Different types:

  • Mechanical rotation (mostly used; easy to be broken, not reliable)
  • MEMS-mirror: just rotate a small mirror (reliable)
  • Optical phase array: doesn't move; use electricity to control the direction of laser; more challenging production (but more reliable)
  • Flash LiDAR

Raw data:

  • distance
  • vertical or horizontal angle
  • timestamp

Evolution

  • Smaller & Cheaper
  • Denser data
  • Solid state

Advantages:

  • Accurate depth (more accurate than radar)
  • Active sensor
  • Robust against ambient light

Disadvantages:

  • Sparse (1080 of camera vs 64)
  • Bulky (taking up much space; large and unwieldy)

2. Camera

Applications:

  • Obstacle detection / classification
  • Traffic light (sometimes not easy)

Important specs:

  • Dynamic range: cover different levels of brightness
  • Global shutter vs rolling shutter (cheaper; can read the data line by line; need to be corrected)

Advantages:

  • Low cost
  • Rich data
  • Color

Disadvantages:

  • Only 2D info (need to reconstruct 3D scenes)
  • Affected by ambient light
  • Computation burden
  • Storage burden
  • Bandwidth burden

3. Radar

Radio detection and ranging

Determine the range, angle and velocity of objects

Emits chirps?

short range mode or far range mode

Advantages:

  • Usable under bad weather
  • Good longitude speed accuracy

Disadvantages:

  • Bad lateral speed accuracy
  • False positives

4. GPS

Real Time Differential GPS

  • DGPS receiver
  • DGPS site

5. IMU

Inertial Measurement Unit

measures relative ego-position and ego-pose

drift over time

6. Compute System

SoC: System on a chip


Last update: October 17, 2021
Authors: Co1lin