The advantage of lidar is that it can generate precise three-dimensional images of everything from cars to trees to cyclists in a variety of environments and under a variety of lighting conditions. The same technology is used to delineate terrain from airplanes and detect speeding violations. It is a type of sensor that is at the heart of many autonomous car designs and is critical to several worldwide high-resolution mapping efforts. Lidar - pronounced LIE-dar - is shorthand for light detection and ranging. In that case, Waymo accuses a former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, of stealing trade secrets about the company’s lidar designs for his own autonomous driving startup - which he sold to Uber for nearly $700 million. The technology, which uses near-infrared light to detect the shape of objects around it, is the centerpiece of an intense court fight in California between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving business operated by Google’s parent, Alphabet. “We believe it will be the basis for autonomous driving,” said Guillaume Devauchelle, who oversees innovation at Valeo, a major parts supplier to automakers. And engineers say it is essential to making autonomous cars safe. Startups around the world are racing to develop new versions of it. Giant tech companies are fighting over the technology in court.

Luminar lidar cost