I don't know how the system is integrated into the self driving logic as a whole. But a few years ago when we were working on a self driving train, LIDAR was us

I don't know how the system is integrated into the self driving logic as a whole. But a few years ago when we were working on a self driving train, LIDAR was used as a system that reports back a list of obstacles (position, size, maybe a simple shape descriptor) or as an obstacle map that is laid out in a grid and shows which cells are occupied and how high the thi g occupying the cell is. If your system that processes the pointcloud and creates this data does not detect faulty (or missing) data from the sensor the higher level logic will happily hum along believing that nothing is amiss. And some LIDARs even have the option to do the processing on the device itself (i.e. IBEO). In which case you can theoretically work with only a list of obstacles reported back by the sensor.