6 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science
Why is a lidar much more expensive than a radar?
In ADAS systems one or several radars are used in a single car, while everyone talks about the advantages of lidar though its costs are currently prohibitive even just for a single detector.
Comment by glowinghands at 13/12/2023 at 16:45 UTC
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
In a nutshell, while they both use light, radar uses waves and lidar uses beams. These beams are more expensive (in comparison) both to generate and to process on return. The components necessary to create and receive the laser beams are expensive, and much more processing power is necessary to do the math to turn the received signal into a meaningful result is significantly more than radar (which is basically just a clock and a little arithmetic)
Chances are 4D radar will replace existing radar and lidar in the coming years.
Comment by baseball_mickey at 13/12/2023 at 16:47 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The company I used to work for sold components for ADAS radar. The electronics for automotive radar tend to be in mature process technologies while LIDAR requires more advanced processes. The underlying tech doing the work for radar is less complicated and less expensive - at least it was 5 years ago when I had colleagues working on it. The article below discusses how radar got less expensive and how that might happen to LIDAR in the future.