What happens when multiple lidar devices start shooting laser beams at a scene? Will there be interference?
* it only takes 1 microsecond to make a ranging measurement up to 150 m, so your detector is on for a short time
* lasers only illuminate a small spot, and the detector is also looking at a similarly small spot, so it is unlikely for two lidars to point in the same spot
Now, even if it does interfere, you may see a stream of random points pointed towards the interference source. This may happen if, say, you point a lidar directly at the sun, or if you have multiple lidars mounted on the same vehicle. Such random points are easily rejected as outliers and do not affect the vast majority of the scene. Most self driving cars (I hope) should have outlier rejection schemes that deal with outliers caused by this and other sources, such as snow, smoke, and so on.
For this reason we see many self driving cars bristling with a bunch of lidars next to each other with no problems. For example the Cruise/GM ones have five Velodynes on top.
Just another of the many edgecases to figure out before autonomous vehicles become mainstream.
Active systems like radars have a "burn-through" short range - at some short distance, the sensing system overpowers a jammer. So if you're seeing junk at distance, but good signal at short range, you know you're being jammed and have to slow down.
Active jamming is not that effective against things that receive directionally, as people using car "radar jammers" near military bases sometimes discover. They show up on military radars as hostile targets. That's even filtering down to police LIDAR guns.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/9/16448306/gm-cruise-strobe...
(Disclaimer, I work for GM, but not on any of this)
When they talk about rejecting solar interference I'd presume, but can't be sure, that whatever they do would also help a lot with lidar on lidar interference.
It's unclear if this product works in the time-domain or in the frequency domain...
If you want more details, Image Sensors World [1] has coverage with more details and links to two patents.
> It's unclear if this product works in the time-domain
It is a pulsed time of flight direct detection lidar, not a modulated continuous wave lidar.
[1] http://image-sensors-world.blogspot.com/2018/11/ouster-discu...
Longer range lidars work in the time domain. The SPAD detectors used by Ouster create a pulse when a single photon is detected and so you're measuring the time of flight of the photon being emitted by the vscel and then being detected by the SPAD array.