Driverless cars and autonomous robots use LiDARs for several objectives including collision avoidance as a primary safety concern. To extend the field-of-view, existing commercial products rotate the sensing unit to measure the distance from the surrounding objects inside a plane (2D scanning) or across several rings (3D scanning). No matter how large the field-of-view of the LiDAR would be, the body of the vehicle is always a major source of occlusion for the sensor. To cover all the blind spots around the vehicle, currently, there is no other way but mounting several LiDAR sensors. This approach is costly, resource demanding, prone to damage, and visually unpleasant.

Distributed LiDAR is a collision avoidance sensor that measures the distance from the surrounding objects through any desired subsection of the field of view, using optical fibers for delivery and collection of light. The optical fibers can be distributed across any desired surface. Examples would be the bumpers of a car or the exterior body parts of a drones. Because the sensor can be embedded in the body of the carrier machine, the sensor is not occluded by the carrier. Furthermore, from the perspective of being a part of a commercial solution, integration in the body of the vehicle makes the sensor much more visually pleasant.