https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/self-driving-autonomous-sensor-lidar-baraja-prism/ > Don't worry, we'll explain. lidar is a technology that uses lasers to map out an area visually. It's very good at providing an accurate picture of the world around it, but its downside comes when you need to move the laser to get a bigger picture. The most popular supplier of lidar scanners today, Velodyne, spins its lasers around in a housing almost 100 times per second but this has problems. > A system like the one Velodyne uses has a lot of moving parts, and when you mount something with a lot of moving parts on a vehicle, it's only a matter of time before the vibrations caused by driving shake it to bits. Baraja's system gets around this using prisms to bend the lidar's laser beam, dramatically reducing the number of parts in the system.