Quantum lidar could help driverless vehicles spot bright objects

Driverless cars can use lasers to sense objects, but reflected light from nearby vehicles or bright sunlight can interfere. A system using entangled photons could help the vehicles avoid obstacles

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

5 July 2023

Entangled photons could make better detectors for driverless cars

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Driverless cars can use pulses of laser light to sense objects and measure how far away they are, but this can fail when it is very bright out or a lot of light is reflected from nearby vehicles. Swapping out the lasers for particles of quantum light could make it easier for autonomous vehicles to avoid collisions.

Lidar uses laser light to detect objects, similar to how radar uses radio waves. But there are a lot of sources of light on a …

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