Elon Musk was right when he called lidar a “crutch” when it came to self-driving cars. Where he’s not right, though, is that the technology’s crutchitude is somehow a reason not to employ lidar—which uses lasers to scan the world around them, identify objects and characterize surroundings to centimeter accuracy—as a fundamental sensor on self-driving…
toddneff
The Riegl booth at ILMF 2019. The technology has come a long way since 2003.
I’m at the International Lidar Mapping Forum in Denver for the third-straight year. The first year, I came to get some sense of the lidar landscape for a book project I was thinking about proposing. That experience distilled into the opener…
I'm a little late on this (thanks to Eric Desfonds of Excelitas for the reminder this morning), but GEDI launched on Wednesday, Dec. 5, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket. It's being integrated on the International Space Station as I type these words.
Jim Pontius, the Goddard Space Flight Center's GEDI program manager, was kind enough…
A lidar image of the Borrego Fault in Baja California, Mexico, courtesy of the University of California, Davis
Eva Botkin-Kowacki's excellent big-picture story on lidar is out today in the Christian Science Monitor. In her reporting, she came across "The Laser That's Changing the World" and, from there, me.
It's an interesting thing, as a journalist, to…
A lidar elevation map taken from an aircraft (courtesy Harris Corp. via SPAR 3D)
I was recently in touch with a writer friend of mine who lives in London. We’re both old enough that we emailed rather than Snapchatted or WhatsApped. I mentioned that I was writing a book about the history of lidar. He’s a…