“We can measure that distance of each individual photon traveling inside the snow,” says Hu, a researcher at NASA’s Langley Research Center.Just as an ant wanders around its underground colony, a photon shot from a space laser takes a random route through the snow.

“If you look long-term, a company like Intel needs to look for new growth domains.Mobileye’s lidar SoC is the sharpest example of what Intel calls its “XPU” strategy—that is, looking beyond the CPU to computing in all of its many forms.

According to radiocarbon dates of charcoal fragments mixed in with the layers of dirt that make up the platform, people started building Aguada Fenix by around 1000 BCE (although Inomata and his colleagues can’t rule out the idea that construction started even earlier).

Now it’s once again in the vanguard, announcing Wednesday that it will be the first automaker to use a lidar laser vision system to enable what it calls “fully autonomous highway driving” in its cars, starting in 2022.That news is the result of a deal with Luminar , the eight-year-old lidar company helmed by 25-year-old Austin Russell.

But it’s not really about the iPad Pro. Apple put a lidar scanner in a tablet to prepare, almost certainly, for when it puts one in a pair of AR glasses.

Anthony Levandowski, the once-lauded engineer who cofounded Google’s self-driving car project and helped spark interest in autonomous vehicles , pleaded guilty Thursday to stealing a confidential Google document shortly before leaving the company.

Luminar’s Iris lidar sensor will cost as little as $500, making it a realistic option for helping personally owned vehicles drive themselves. The upshot of bringing lidar into consumer cars is a potentially major upgrade over the semi-autonomous systems currently on the road, like Tesla’s Autopilot , Cadillac’s Super Cruise , and Nissan’s ProPilot Assist .

The developer of self-driving car technology announced Thursday it’s acquiring lidar maker Blackmore , whose laser scanning tech offers the unusual and very helpful ability not just to detect nearby objects, but to discern their velocity.

If you measure a strike or a boycott by how badly it disrupts the day-to-day life of its targets, Wednesday’s action by drivers for the Uber and Lyft ride-hailing apps doesn’t appear to have made much of a mark.

By next year, Musk pledged, robotic Tesla taxis will pick up passengers, even though no fully self-driving cars currently exist. Aarian Marshall covers autonomous vehicles, transportation policy, and urban planning for WIRED.Late Monday, the company released a video of a Tesla driving on suburban California roads and highways.

The autonomous tech company that started life in 2009 as Google’s self-driving car project announced today it’s creating a new revenue stream by selling its custom-developed, short range laser sensors.

Self-Driving's Outcast Returns With a Robotruck SchemeFormer Googler and Uberista Anthony Levandowski is back on the self-driving scene with a robot truck scheme that values camera and machine learning over lidar and detailed maps.picture alliance/Getty ImagesAnthony Levandowski, the engineer whose alleged theft of trade secrets landed him in the middle of a blockbuster self-driving car legal fight, has stepped back into the spotlight with a new company.

Resolution is what lets the computer identify that obstacle as another vehicle, pedestrian, or cyclist.LEARN MOREThe WIRED Guide to Self-Driving CarsSince this summer, AID has been running its Munich-based fleet of autonomous E-golfs (about a dozen strong, and soon to be replaced with Audi E-trons) with two roof-mounted forward-facing Luminar lidars.

Checking it has plenty of room, it makes a quick juke to the left, pulling its 18 wheels and four human passengers over the dashed white line.This lane change is just one of a variety of impressive maneuvers TuSimple’s self-driving truck executes during a 40-minute demo ride I took with CTO Xiaodi Hou on a sunny Friday morning last month.

But you can only measure where something’s going, and how fast, if you manage to hit it again and again.Blackmore's lidar reads the velocity of the objects it detects: The things moving away from the vehicle are in red, those moving toward it are in blue.

A single season of drought in the Amazon rainforest can reduce the forest's carbon dioxide absorption for years after the rains return, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.