> you don't have to do object recognition on the point cloud This is true, as long as you're willing to treat everything your LiDAR sees equally. The problem w

> you don't have to do object recognition on the point cloud This is true, as long as you're willing to treat everything your LiDAR sees equally. The problem with this is that you're treating, say, a patch of grass (which you might as well drive over), a rock (which you'd rather drive around) and a pedestrian (which you might rather stop for, as a moving obstacle) the same way. Object recognition is still a good idea with LiDAR. And I'm not even getting into noisy returns or "negative" obstacles (i.e. holes). Disclaimer: has done research in object recognition with LiDAR ;)