What are the future applications of lidar sensors?

Radar is not unfamiliar to many people, but LiDAR may not hear much. With the continuous development and popularization of laser technology, in recent years, exposure of driverless technologies such as Google and Tesla have attracted wide attention It can be seen in drones, 3D printing, VR / AR and other fields.
Lidar, or light detection and measurement, is a system that combines laser, global positioning system (GPS), and inertial navigation system (INS) technologies to obtain data and generate accurate DEM (digital elevation model) . From the working principle, there is no fundamental difference with microwave radar, but compared with microwave radar, it has the characteristics of high resolution, good concealment, strong anti-interference ability, good low-altitude detection performance, small size and light weight. The role of lidar is to accurately measure target position (distance and angle), motion state (speed, vibration, and attitude) and shape, and detect, identify, distinguish, and track targets. E.g:
Lidar can help robots understand surrounding map information in unknown environments, provide good environmental awareness for subsequent positioning and navigation, and even human-machine interaction, and promote the robot's intelligent process.
A lidar, which costs 40% of driverless cars, can help driverless cars obtain three-dimensional position information of their environment, determine the position, size, external appearance, and even materials of objects, with "accurate" and "fast" The space detection capability of "efficient operation" has become an indispensable presence in the field of unmanned driving.
Possible applications for lidar in the future include intralogistics, mobile devices and robotics, which means that multi-layer scanners require a particularly robust design. The pulse ranging technology in some lidars not only ensures a high degree of independence from object and surface characteristics, but also ensures a high level of immunity to external light, high-frequency lights, and optical reflections from the application environment.