Comparison of VLP-16 and MRS-1000 LiDAR systems with absolute interferometer

Nowadays, LiDARs hold a relevant place in providing the environmental sensing required by most ADAS. Promoted by such increasing demand, many new manufacturers are emerging and, new LiDARs are continuously made available on the market. If, on the one hand, the availability of LiDARs with increasing performance and reducing cost has brought significant benefits also promoting the spread of such measuring systems in other areas such as industrial controls and agriculture, on the other, it has made it more difficult to extricate in the immense set of LiDARs present on the market today. In response to this growing need for standards and methods capable of comparing the various LiDARs, many international standards and scientific publications are being produced on the subject. In this paper, we continue our work on LiDARs characterization, focusing our attention on comparing the performances of two of the most popular systems - namely, the MRS 1000 by Sick and the VLP 16 by Velodyne. Starting from the analysis of the warm-up time and stability, such a comparison focused on analyzing the axial error of both systems. Such errors have been estimated by exploiting a custom rail system and an absolute interferometer. The obtained results revealed warm-up times of a few tens of minutes and maximum absolute axial errors of a few centimeters in the range [1.5, 21] m.