Rain or Shine, Stop on Time!

Overview

Autonomous vehicles often use time-of-flight (ToF) sensors that emit near-infrared light and measure the return time to estimate the distance to obstacles. In extreme weather and lighting, water droplets and bright light may affect the sensor signal, which could impact safety. In this project, a Raspberry Pi car equipped with a TF-Luna single-point ToF LiDAR sensor was tested to measure how far the car stopped from an obstacle under five conditions: high illumination (control), no light, intense illumination, high illumination with rain, and high illumination with fog. It was hypothesized that the car would stop closest in high illumination with fog due to Mie scattering weakening the returned infrared signal. Across 20 trials per condition, the car stopped closest in rain (average 43.7 cm) and farthest in fog (average 74.7 cm), likely because dense fog produced backscattering so the sensor treated the fog itself as an obstacle. The hypothesis was partially supported because the prediction that rain would cause the car to stop close was supported, but fog did not cause the closest stopping distance. Future work could improve the setup by mounting the rain, fog, and lighting devices to the car for more consistent exposure and by testing additional sensor types in the same conditions.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Electronics & Electromagnetics (Junior Division) · Entry J-10-12

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