I don't know the system, but I'm sure it's already synchronous in that there are numerous receiver channels and their acquisition values are correlated with the illumination angle.
If the system has to deallocate time channels for other vehicles to use, it loses bandwidth, proportional to the number of vehicles in the vicinity.
Sharing the data between vehicles is possible, however, it invokes geographical/networking problems, such as how to partition the acquisition, how to synchronize the acquisition and how to share it, including the necessary bandwidth, which I'm sure is quite high.
As soon as multiple vehicles sharing data enters the picture, security must also get factored in. Besides the link control concerns, the system will be sensitive to jamming with that much multiplexed sampling taking place.
PP is correct in hinting that the leap to multiple self-driving vehicles from one self-driving vehicle will be large indeed.
> I don't know the system, but I'm sure it's already synchronous in that there are numerous receiver channels and their acquisition values are correlated with the illumination angle.
This is not "synchronous detection" in the way I meant it. I don't mean this as a put-down, but it may be instructive to Google "lock-in amplifier," a term I mentioned in my previous post.
All of your other concerns are addressed by appropriate choice of PRN code(s). Additional vehicles, which operate without the need for coordination, merely raise the noise floor. They do not "jam" each other. It should be obvious that a minimum S/N ratio is required for the LIDAR system to work and further that an arbitrarily-high number of LIDAR transmitters therefore cannot coexist. However, it is far from obvious (to me, at least without learning more about LIDAR and plugging in some numbers to a model) that a congested freeway of driverless cars would have "too many" LIDAR transmitters.
If the system has to deallocate time channels for other vehicles to use, it loses bandwidth, proportional to the number of vehicles in the vicinity.
Sharing the data between vehicles is possible, however, it invokes geographical/networking problems, such as how to partition the acquisition, how to synchronize the acquisition and how to share it, including the necessary bandwidth, which I'm sure is quite high.
As soon as multiple vehicles sharing data enters the picture, security must also get factored in. Besides the link control concerns, the system will be sensitive to jamming with that much multiplexed sampling taking place.
PP is correct in hinting that the leap to multiple self-driving vehicles from one self-driving vehicle will be large indeed.