Here’s a video of the the two head-to-head scanning the same room (RP Lidar is the window on the right) Both were tested on a sunny day for the outdoors test, in exactly the same way.īoth have desktop apps that allow you to visualize the data. I tested them both in small autonomous cars, as shown below (RP Lidar at left).
Sadly the Scanse code that does those cool things does not appear to be exposed as libraries or APIs that you can use yourself. The Scanse desktop visualization software is better, with lots of cool options such as line detection and point grouping, but in practice you won’t use it since you’ll just be reading the data via Python in your own code. ~4-5m outdoors, ~14-16m indoors (much more than claimed range of 6m)īottom line: RP Lidar A2 is smaller, much higher resolution, and better range indoors (it’s notable that the real-world RP Lidar performance was above the stated specs, while the Scanse performance was below its stated specs). ~4-5m outdoors, ~12m indoors (much less than claimed range of 40m) Read on for the details.įirst, here are the basic spec comparisons: But in practice, the difference between them become very stark, with the biggest being the four times higher resolution of the RP Lidar A2 (4,000 points per second, versus Sweep’s 1,000), which makes it actually useful outdoors in a way that Sweep is not. Sweep is the first lidar from Scanse, a US company, and was a Kickstarter project based on the Lidar-Lite 3 1D laser range finder unit that was also a Kickstarter project a few years ago (I was an adviser for that) and is now part of Garmin. The RP Lidar A2 is the second lidar from Slamtec, a Chinese company with a good track record. I put two to the test: the RP Lidar A2 (left above) and the Scanse Sweep (right).
But how good are they for small autonomous vehicles?
It’s now possible to buy small scanning 2D Lidars for less than $400 these days, which is pretty amazing, since they were as much as $30,000 a few years ago.