Functional Safety of a Lidar Sensor System

Lidars are gaining popularity in the automotive domain especially in the field of autonomous driving systems. Lidars can also be used in industrial applications for object tracking. Safety and Reliability are of utmost importance for such applications, especially when human interaction is involved. The international standard IEC61508 has set out a general approach for all safety life-cycle activities for systems that perform safety functions. Diverse redundancy is one of the techniques recommended to achieve high Safety Integrity Level (SIL). A functional safety methodology for Lidar Systems is being proposed by making use of Direct Averaging and Comparator Averaging for hardware diversity.