Single-Photon Detection Approach for Autonomous Vehicles Sensing

Robustness to interference and low energy consumption are two important issues hindering development of laser-sensing technology for autonomous driving. In this paper, we propose and present an all-in-one sensing solution based on single-photon-detector (SPD) for autonomous driving to address those issues. Incorporating one laser source and several SPDs, the proposed solution is capable of collision avoidance LIDAR and lane marker detection simultaneously. The proposed solution is introduced theoretically, and the effectiveness is further validated by proof-of-concept indoor experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed SPD-based sensing solution can robustly detect targets on the road 16.1% faster than the previous proposition, and it can also achieve error free recognition of lane marker at the speed range of 0-96 km/h.