Sensors and Autonomy

Sensors and Autonomy is your field guide to how modern self-driving stacks actually “see,” “understand,” and act on the road. From the physics of LIDAR to the strengths and limits of cameras and radar, this book demystifies the full perception pipeline-feature extraction, fusion, tracking, and decision-making-so readers can evaluate systems with clarity, design safer prototypes, and speak confidently with engineers, policymakers, and vendors.

Inside, you’ll learn:

What each sensor does best-range precision, depth cues, weather resilience, low-light performance-and when each one fails.

Fusion in practice-synchronization, time offsets, calibration pitfalls, and how teams blend heterogeneous data streams for robust perception.

From pixels and point clouds to actions-detection, classification, SLAM, mapping, prediction, planning, and control-explained in plain language.

Safety, validation, and reliability-coverage, redundancy, fail-operational design, edge cases, simulation, and scenario libraries.

Real-world constraints-latency, compute budgets, thermal limits, sensor placement, cost trade-offs, and maintainability in fleets.

Whether you’re an engineer, researcher, product leader, regulator, or curious tech reader, you’ll finish with a grounded understanding of how autonomous systems perceive the world-and how to ask the right questions about safety, performance, and readiness.