Predicting the Influence of Rain on LIDAR in ADAS

Goodin, C., Carruth, D. W., Doude, M., & Hudson, C. R. (2019). Predicting the Influence of Rain on LIDAR in ADAS. Electronics. MDPI. 8(1), 89. DOI:10.3390/electronics8010089.

Abstract

While it is well known that rain may influence the performance of automotive LIDAR sensors commonly used in ADAS applications, there is a lack of quantitative analysis of this effect. In particular, there is very little published work on physically-based simulation of the influence of rain on terrestrial LIDAR performance. Additionally, there have been few quantitative studies on how rain-rate influences ADAS performance. In this work, we develop a mathematical model for the performance degradation of LIDAR as a function of rain-rate and incorporate this model into a simulation of an obstacle-detection system to show how it can be used to quantitatively predict the influence of rain on ADAS that use LIDAR.