Luminar Technologies Inc (LAZR)

[doinit]

LAZR,,,The science and engineering behind LiDAR are complex. But, at a high level, the idea is pretty digestible.

LiDAR sensors “beam” out lasers to their surroundings. Those laser beams hit objects around the car, and then bounce back to the sensors. The sensors then either carefully measure the travel time of those laser pulses (called time-of-flight, ToF), or a change in frequency of the returning light wave (called Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave, FMCW), to create a proxy for distance.

Do this thousands of times in a 360-degree frame-of-view, and voila… you have a complete and dynamic “picture” of the surrounding environment.