Is there any chance Lidar could be used in consumer drones in the future?
The hack people used to do (maybe still do?) was to combine a laser pointer and a webcam, and infer the distance based on where in the Y axis the laser appeared in the image that the webcam received.
This, which is many points in many directions, is much, much better, and it sounds like it will be cheap (at least much cheaper than these devices have been).
Right now there's not much in the way of LiDAR on anything, but once there is, we will need to find ways to stop other active sensors from interfering with our own.