Toward Intelligent Sensing: Optimizing Lidar Beam Distribution for Autonomous Driving

LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) sensors have been widely used in autonomous vehicles as the main sensors. According to the specification details of the widely used 3D LiDAR products in the market, the distribution of vertical beam channels is set according to a uniform angular resolution, which is not ideally efficient for specific autonomous tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to find the optimized angular distribution of the vertical beam channels for different application scenarios and installation configurations. The experimental results in a study case suggest that concerning the vehicle detection task, the optimized LiDARs perform almost two times better than the ones with the same number of channels in terms of the detection range, and have perception performances close to the LiDARs with double channels in the long distance.