LIDAR has gained much popularity as a means for self-driving cars to survey the space around them. At their most basic, LIDAR is a surveying method that uses lasers to paints the space around the ...

So far, almost every autonomous vehicle we've encountered uses lidar to determine how far away things are, just as the winners of the DARPA Grand Challenges did back in the early 2000s.

Researchers showed that their new hyperspectral Raman imaging lidar system can detect and identify various types of plastics from 6 meters away. The plastic sample they tested (pictured) has a ...