3 ms·

To be fair, rain and snow interfere with millimetre wave radar too.

• loeg 8y ago
  And visible spectrum light (human eyes).
  • furgooswft13 8y ago
    And humans have the unique ability to instantly and reliably differentiate between visual noise and objects on the road they wish to avoid. Lidar's record much less information than than 2 optical lenses (eyes). You got distance in 1, 2, or 2+1 dimensions, and intensity. Eyes can detect distance, wavelength, reflections, refraction, contrast, brightness etc. All with the assistance of the brain of course. If today's computers and software had the pattern matching capabilities of even a human child's brain (reasoning aside), a few moderate resolution video cameras would be all that is necessary for self driving. But we're not there yet so we employ sensors with limited detection that is simpler to interpret programmatically. I think even humans would have trouble interpreting the mess of lidar distance graphs in a rain/snow storm, though they'd still do better than current computers.