In my last blog post, I discussed optical Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensing and explained how it works with a single emitter that produces a single beam of light and a single-pixel detector. Because of this setup, we could measure the ToF at only one point in space.
The question, then, is: How can we sense depth across an entire area? The answer lies in Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) — a system based on ToF that can measure depth over a broad region. In this blog post, I will (a) discuss the fundamentals of LiDAR and (b) demonstrate the optical system of a specific type of LiDAR, Flash LiDAR, using Zemax.