Concurrent firing light detection and ranging system for autonomous vehicles

Abstract

We proposed a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) system that changes the measurement strategy from a LIDAR system of sequential emission and measuring method to a concurrent firing measuring method. The proposed LIDAR was a 3D scanning LIDAR method that consisted of 128 output channels in one vertical line in the measurement direction and concurrently measured the distance for each of these 128 channels. The scanning LIDAR emitted 128 laser pulse streams encoded by carrier-hopping prime code (CHPC) technology with identification and checksum. When the reflected pulse stream was received and demodulated, the emission channel could be recognized. This information could be used to estimate the time when the laser pulse stream was emitted and calculate the distance to the object reflecting the laser. By using the identification of the received reflected wave, even if several positions were measured at the same time, the measurement position could be recognized after the reception. Extensive simulations indicated that the proposed LIDAR could provide autonomous vehicles or autonomous walking robots with good distance images to recognize the environment ahead.