Toward High-Integrity Roadway Applications of Georeferenced Lidar Positioning: A Review

As a step toward founding the new field of lidar integrity, this paper compiles a list of lidar faults, threats, anomalies, and challenges – which we collectively label adversities. Engineers will eventually need to characterize and mitigate these adversities for rigorous quantification of lidar integrity. Lidar adversities manifest at the intersection of environment, hardware, and algorithms. By extension, the specific design approach or architecture of a lidar system, as well as its application, must be specified to define a complete set of adversities and resulting measurement-error distributions, including operationally hazardous errors. To this end, we focus on the application of absolute positioning for high-integrity roadway operations and identify three promising lidar architectures for that application. In comparing and contrasting these architectures, we review the broader literature to identify associated lidar adversities, and we provide a perspective on how those adversities might be mitigated in the future.