Coherent lidar for ride-hailing autonomous vehicles

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.
Comment: Presented at Photonics West, San Francisco, CA, USA, January 25 - 30, 2025, Paper 13345-23