CHARACTERIZATION SETUP FOR PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF LIDARS

The concept of Autonomous driving is taking a major role in the future of mobility, experts agree to the fact that is doomed to revolutionize the entire world of car industry. OEMs are looking forward to integrating the most performant sensors to their car by testing the commercially available devices. LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) belong to such a class of sensors which according to experts, will allow a self driving car to scan the surrounding environment and autonomously take decision regarding the correct action to take. Given the relevance of topic, in recent years many researches and some national and international standards have been proposed or updated to allow both to evaluate measurement performances and to compare performance among different instruments. However, such methods and standards are more focused on the overall system performance and does not allow to investigate specific aspect of LiDAR's systems. As an example, despite the relevance that spots have on the evaluation of the performance of the LiDAR system, such parameters are not always, if ever, fully provided by LiDAR manufacturers and no other standard measurement method has been previously proposed for their analysis.This thesis has been aimed at the development of novel standard methods for the characterization and comparison of LiDAR systems. In particular, the activities have been focused on range error, warm-up time, temporal stability, spatio-temporal beam spot analysis and, beam divergence and profile.