Perception

LiDAR

LiDAR (light detection and ranging) is an active sensor that measures distance by emitting laser pulses and timing their reflections, producing 2D scans or 3D point clouds of the surrounding geometry. Variants include mechanically spinning units, solid-state and MEMS-mirror designs, and flash LiDAR. Compared with cameras, LiDAR provides direct metric depth largely independent of ambient lighting, at the cost of sparsity, price, and weaker semantic content.

Why it matters for physical AI

Direct, lighting-invariant geometry remains the backbone of dependable localization and obstacle avoidance for mobile robots and autonomous vehicles, complementing learned camera-based perception where metric certainty is safety-critical.