Here's an interesting "lidar gem" from Hacker News a few years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554679

Lidar obstacle detection algorithm from a Git repo leaked onto Tor

This is a drivable region mapping (obstacle detection) algorithm found in what appears to be a git repo leaked from an autonomous vehicle company in 2017. The repo was available through one or more Tor hidden services for several years.

The lidar code appears to be written for the Velodyne HDL-32E. It operates in a series of stages, each stage refining the output of the previous stage. This algorithm is in the second stage. It is the primary obstacle detection method, with the other methods making only small improvements.

The leaked code uses a column-major matrix of points and it explicitly handles NaNs (the no-return points). We've rewritten it to use a much more cache-efficient row-major matrix layout and a conditional that will ignore the NaN points without explicit testing.

This is an amazingly effective method of obstacle detection, considering its simplicity.