Humans manage to drive in an acceptable fashion using just two eyes and two ears to sense the world around them. Autonomous vehicles are kitted out with sensor packages altogether more complex. They typically rely on radar, lidar, ultrasonic sensors, or cameras all working in concert to detect the road conditions ahead.
While humans are pretty wily and difficult to fool, our robot driving friends are less robust. Some researchers are concerned that LiDAR sensors could be spoofed, hiding obstacles and tricking driverless cars into crashes, or worse.
Where Did It Go?
Using a laser to send false echoes back to a LiDAR sensor on an autonomous vehicle can be used to hide objects from its field of view. Credit: Research paper, Cao, Yulong and Bhupathiraju, S. Hrushikesh and Naghavi, Pirouz and Sugawara, Takeshi and Mao, Z. Morley and Rampazzi, Sara
LiDAR is so named as it is a light-based equivalent of radar technology. Unlike radar, though, it’s still typically treated as an acronym rather than a word in its own right. The technology sends out laser pulses and captures the light reflected back from the environment. Pulses returning from objects further away take longer to arrive back at the LiDAR sensor, allowing the sensor to determine the range of objects around it. It’s typically considered the gold-standard sensor for autonomous driving purposes. This is due to its higher accuracy and reliability compared to radar for object detection in automotive environments. Plus, it offers highly-detailed depth data which is simply not available from a regular 2D camera.
A new research paper has demonstrated an adversarial method of tricking LiDAR sensors. The method uses a laser to selectively hide certa ..
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