Evaluation and Testing System for Automotive LiDAR Sensors

The world is facing a great technological transformation towards fully autonomous vehicles, where optimists predict that by 2030 autonomous vehicles will be sufficiently reliable, affordable, and common to displace most human driving. To cope with these trends, reliable perception systems must enable vehicles to hear and see all their surroundings, with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors being a key instrument for recreating a 3D visualization of the world in real time. However, perception systems must rely on accurate measurements of the environment. Thus, these intelligent sensors must be calibrated and benchmarked before being placed on the market or assembled in a car. This article presents an Evaluation and Testing Platform for Automotive LiDAR sensors, with the main goal of testing both commercially available sensors and new sensor prototypes currently under development in Bosch Car Multimedia Portugal. The testing system can benchmark any LiDAR sensor under different conditions, recreating the expected driving environment in which such devices normally operate. To characterize and validate the sensor under test, the platform evaluates several parameters, such as the field of view (FoV), angular resolution, sensor’s range, etc., based only on the point cloud output. This project is the result of a partnership between the University of Minho and Bosch Car Multimedia Portugal.