We equip our drone with a Lidar laser to capture real world data points that we can process to gather many types of information.
How does lidar work? A typical lidar sensor emits pulsed light waves from a laser into the environment. These pulses bounce off surrounding objects and return to the sensor. The sensor uses the time it took for each pulse to return to the sensor to calculate the distance it traveled.
Light detection and ranging (lidar) is a remote sensing technology used to acquire elevation data about the Earth's surface. A lidar system consisted of three main components: the laser ranging system, Global Positioning System (GPS) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) (Figure 1).