&gt; you don&#x27;t have to do object recognition on the point cloud<p>This is true, as long as you&#x27;re willing to treat everything your LiDAR sees equally. The problem with this is that you&#x27;re treating, say, a patch of grass (which you might as well drive over), a rock (which you&#x27;d rather drive around) and a pedestrian (which you might rather stop for, as a moving obstacle) the same way. Object recognition is still a good idea with LiDAR. And I&#x27;m not even getting into noisy returns or &quot;negative&quot; obstacles (i.e. holes).<p>Disclaimer: has done research in object recognition with LiDAR ;)