Musk has said several times Lidar is great. It's just a stupid idea for automotive use and he's not wrong.
There's nothing similar in nature for a reason.
There's nothing similar in nature for a reason.
Assuming that all technology should imitate nature is a naive engineering principle. The solution should solve the problem within the given constraints.
Portable, energy efficient, light, doesn't need refined oil, tightly steers...
Boats and aeroplanes are terrible in comparison. They only work due to a huge network of global effort.
And horses don’t need roads like cars do and cars only work thanks to a huge network of global effort. What point are you trying to make? That we abandon planes until we can develop flight as efficient as nature? Abandoning LIDAR until we can develop visual light perception and processing equal to the human eye and brain?
Skimming the Wikipedia article[2], it seems like animals do use time of flight, but also Doppler shifting.
(As a side note, some animals have apparently evolved active countermeasures to echolocation!? It seems obvious in retrospect but incredibly cool.)
There's interesting research into the mechanisms of human echolocation [3], but it was over my head. My impression was that the jury is out as far as the precise mechanisms involved but that there's a lot of evidence to be considered, I'm sure someone with a better background would get more out of it than I did.
(I'm just curious about the mechanism, I agree that LIDAR has natural analogs.)
[1] Speed of sound * 25ms, 25ms being the rule of thumb I've memorized for the minimum interval for two sounds to register as distinct from each other. This is just folk wisdom I've picked up hacking on audio, so perhaps I'm mistaken.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation
[3] https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1375913/1963...