Improvement of Black Car Paint for Enhanced Visibility to LiDAR Systems
2022-01-0413
03/29/2022
- Event
- Content
- One of the most revolutionary technological developments in recent years has been the invention and improvements of autonomous vehicles. LiDAR (Light Detecting and Ranging) sensors, which can generate distance measurement with precision on the order of cm, have been increasingly evaluated and used in the detection of various objects, including vehicles, for transportation safety application and the future adoption and deployment of autonomous vehicles. However, not all objects a vehicle encounters on the road are equally reflective to infrared light used in the LiDAR sensors. In particular, black cars, which make up a significant portion of the market, are minimally reflective to infrared light, and can become invisible to LiDAR systems for certain orientations. Thus black vehicles present a significant challenge to the deployment of autonomous vehicles. The goal of this paper was to develop a novel method for making black car paints more visible to LiDAR systems. Our approach was to use metal particles as an additive to standard car paint, with the goal of achieving higher reflectance of the particles in the near-IR region would significantly improve the overall reflectance of the paint. Samples with different types and amounts of additives were tested using a UV-vis spectrophotometer to determine their reflectance at the 905nm wavelength, used in typical LiDAR sensors. Samples were then further tested at various distances from a commercial LiDAR system and at various angles with respect to the LiDAR system. The results indicated that the additives chosen for this experiment demonstrated improvement for black car paint more visible to LiDAR systems at all distances and angles of rotation tested in the lab.
- Citation
- Block, C., Hays, P., Rogel, C., and Yu, H., "Improvement of Black Car Paint for Enhanced Visibility to LiDAR Systems ," SAE Technical Paper 2022-01-0413, 2022, .