Simon Verghese, Caner Onal and James Dunphy This talk will review some history of Waymo's self driving car project and describe a few use-cases for automotive LIDARs on Waymo cars. Out of that will emerge key differences between single photon sensors for self-driving and traditional applications (biochemistry, astrophysics, mapping lidar) which could provide opportunities for optimizing single photon sensitive detectors for automotive LIDAR receiver implementations. We will discuss some of the unique requirements and challenges of using such detectors in high-dynamic-range environments, keeping in mind the scalability and durability constraints for long term deployment in a Level 4 fully autonomous self driving fleet.
