I was selected to review the LIDAR-Lite 3 Laser Rangefinder High Performance. Being that all of my projects use some sort of object avoidance or detection this was a great project to work on. Testing the LIDAR was done in a few different ways and here we are going to describe that. First of we want to make sure that we are using the most current and up to date library and sketch for the LIDAR. As I found out using the incorrect one will give you some strange measurement and leave you wondering does this work. After getting the correct library and sketch's in place I then began by seeing how accurate it was. My first test was placing the LIDAR on my work bench at one end and then I layed a strip of tape from the base of the LIDAR to the other end of my work bench. I then used a ruller and every 5 cm made a mark on the tape all the way up to 80 cm. Next I placed a rectangular box on the line at 5 cm and tried to measure and it was showing 300 cm. I then tried 10 cm and so on until I reached 45 cm. Once 45 cm was reached it started reading accurately. The next test that I performed was placing it on a moving chassis to see how qucik its response time was and if it could navigate a tracked vehicle around a room. This test was a great success and my little test chassis was able to navigate every obstacle that I put in its path.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/review-of-lidar-lite-3-laser-rangefinder-high-performance-llv3hp