Electronic warfare resistant loitering munitions. They would transmit sparse point clouds to the enemy for training.
Most fpv drones don’t even have GNSS, they fly on acro mode or manual one, so that won’t prevent a “loitering munition”. Now for gnss denied autonomous navigation, Lidar isn’t the corner stone part, for indoor ones other sensors do well if not better like stereo cams, outdoor, you don’t need Lidar that much, but also you can use image based navigation, where it compares prestored images to land marks to navigate accurately. That being said, it’s not like Lidars are completely banned, you can buy one, 2d or 3d lidar, and equip it on your drone that you built, you don’t need dji to have it ready for you, so that ban won’t really mitigate any risk assuming there is one.
> They would transmit sparse point clouds to the enemy for training
Restricted facilities already restrict any kind of drone, other locations you can access these info without the need to transmit any point clouds data anyway.
Why not ban pencils? You can draw maps or schematics of secret things, plus they can be used to stab people!
There are many more reasons LiDAR kicks ass but none of them have anything to do with why they are doing this.
You should do some more research into structure-from-motion and get back to us. Lidar is nice for real-time data, but these days anyone can process a 4k stream and get excellent geometry data.
If a hypothetical hostile and weaponized drone is later deployed with a pretrained navigational model, it might have 4k and/or LIDAR whose function would be to verify rather than figure out navigation; in a state of hostility we can assume the owners of the drone would be indifferent to local rules.
Will America's foes heinously attack the homeland by offering socialistic self-driving vehicles? What exactly the threat model here, that makes Lidar data dangerous? Space-based remote sensing is superior in almost every way.
Before we had these, wind farms used to have to poach cell phone tower guys to climb up every single one. Had a neighbor who did this, it pays insanely well but my palms sweat just thinking about it.