Adding a comment here with some info on LIDAR human safety, since many are asking.

There are two wavelengths of interest used:

  a) 905 nm/940 nm (roof and bumpers): 70–100 µJ per pulse max, regulated by IEC 60825 since this WL is focused on the retina
  b) 1550 nm systems (the Laser Bear Honeycomb): 8–12 mJ per pulse allowed (100x more photons since this WL stays the cornea)

20 cars at an intersection = 20 overlapping scanners, meaning even if each meets single-device Class 1, linear addition could offer your retina a 20x dose enough to push into Class 3B territory. The current regs (IEC 60825-1:2014) assume single-source exposure. There is no standard for multi-source, multi-axis, moving-platform overlay.

Additionally, no LIDAR manufacturer publishes beam-failure shutoff latency. Most are >50ms, which can be long enough for permanent injury

The article talks about eye safety a bit in section 4.

> a stuck mirror

This is one of the advantages of using an array of low power lasers rather than steering a single high power laser. The array physically doesn't have a failure mode where the power gets concentrated in a single direction. Anyway, theoretically, you would hope that class 1 eye-safe lidars should be eye safe even at point blank range, meaning that even if the beam gets stuck pointing into your eye, it would still be more or less safe.

> 20 cars at an intersection = 20 overlapping scanners, meaning even if each meets single-device Class 1, linear addition could offer your retina a 20x dose enough to push into Class 3B territory.

In the article, I point out a small nuance: If you have many lidars around, the beams from each 905 nm lidar will be focused to a different spot on your retina, and you are no worse off than if there was a single lidar. But if there are many 1550 nm lidars around, their beams will have a cumulative effect at heating up your cornea, potentially exceeding the safety threshold.

Also, if a lidar is eye-safe at point blank range, when you have multiple cars tens of meters away, laser beam divergence already starts to reduce the intensity, not to mention that when the lidars are scanning properly, the probability of all of them pointing in the same spot is almost impossible.

By the way, the Waymo Laser Bear Honeycomb is the bumper lidar (940 nm iirc) and not the big 1550 nm unit that was on the Chrysler Pacificas. The newer Jaguar I-Pace cars don't have the 1550 nm lidar at all but have a much bigger and higher performance spinning lidar.

A quick note about units -- you correctly quote the limits as an energy-per-pulse limit. The theory behind this is that pulses are short enough that rotation during a pulse is negligible, so they tend to hit a single point (on the retina, at focusable frequencies; the cornea itself for longer wave lengths), and the absorption of that energy is what causes damage. But LiDAR range is determined not by energy per pulse, but by power. This drives a desire for minimum-time pulses, often < 10 ns -- if you can halve your pulse length, you can increase your range substantially while still being eye-safe. GaNFETs are one of the enabling technologies for pulsed lidar, since they're really the only way out there to steer tens of amps in single-digit nanoseconds. Even once you've solved generating short pulses, though, you still need to interpret short responses. Which drives either a need for very fast ADCs (gigasample+), or TDCs, which are themselves fascinating components.

I was always curious about this, it's impossible to find any safety certifications or details about the lidars used by e.g. Waymo. Are we supposed to just trust that they didn't cut corners, especially given the financial incentives to convince people that lidar is necessary (because there's a notable competitor that doesn't use it).

To date most class-1 lasers have also been hidden/enclosed I think (and there is class 1M for limited medical use), so I'm not convinced that the limits for long-term daily exposure have been properly studied.

Until I see 3rd party studies otherwise, I plan to treat vehicle lidar no different than laser pointers and avoid looking directly at them. If/when cars become common enough that this is too hard to do, maybe I'll purchase NIR blocking glasses (though most ones I found have an ugly green tint, I wonder if it's possible to make the frequency cutoff sharp enough that it doesn't filter out visible reds).

Enormous complexity, safety risks, and completely unnecessary for successful level 4 FSD - the hurdle to full autonomous driving was basically jumped by Tesla this year. I don't see why lidar is even allowed in public at this point, it seems dangerous enough that you'd want it effectively restricted to highly regulated and licensed uses, like military or academic scanning, with all sorts of deliberate safeguards and liability checks.

Social media is full of little clips of lidar systems burning out camera pixels, and I'm sure big proponents of the tech have paid people off over eye injuries at this point. There've probably been a ton of injuries that just got written off as random environmental hazards, "must have looked at the sun" etc.

It's nuts that this stuff gets deployed.

> There are two wavelengths of interest used

Ouster uses (or at least used to use, not sure if they still do) 840 nm. Much higher quantum efficiency for standard silicon receivers, without having to play games with stressed silicon and stuff; but also much better focusing by the retina, so lower power permitted.