What Lidar Data Looks Like and How to Query It with DuckDB

The last couple of posts in this series described navigation algorithms: robot vacuums covering a living room floor, then self-driving taxis doing the same at city scale. In that second post, I mentioned that Waymo vehicles sweep lidar continuously to sense the road around them. That&rsquo;s lidar as a real-time perception tool. There&rsquo;s another side to it: aerial terrain surveys that produce…