Optical Characterization of the Beams Generated by 3-D LiDARs: Proposed Procedure and Preliminary Results on MRS1000

In last years, automotive is pushing to the continuous development of more performing and less expensive measuring systems for supporting advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). In that scenario, light detection and rangings (LiDARs) are one of the key enabling technologies. This has led and will lead to the availability of more and more LiDAR systems and manufacturers. Given the relevance of the topic, in recent years, many studies and some national and international standards have been proposed or updated. However, such methods and standards are more focused on the analysis of the overall system performance and do not allow to investigate specific aspects of LiDAR systems. As an example, despite the relevance that spot size and divergence have on the evaluation of the performance of the LiDAR system, such parameters are not always, if ever, fully provided by LiDARs manufacturers and, to the best of our knowledge, no standard nor measurement method has been previously proposed for their analysis. In this article, we propose novel methods for the characterization and comparison of LiDAR systems with particular focus on the analysis of the spatiotemporal arrangement of beams spots, and beams divergences and profiles. The proposed method has been exploited for the analysis of the MRS1000 LiDAR system by Sick. The obtained results indicated that the MRS1000 simultaneously emits three spots triangularly arranged. As an example, at 6 m distance, such a triangle has a height of about ≈ 4 cm and a base that varies from ≈ 6 to ≈ 11 cm depending on the LiDAR settings.