You wrote:
I predict collisions and chaos…. predicting another land vehicle’s position, lateral speed and direction is one thing. You can always hit the brakes and stop. But flying vehicles don’t have brakes when flying and they travel at higher speeds. Predicting another aircraft’s lateral speed and direction plus vertical speed and direction and making decisions in time to avoid collisions is a reach, doing it for dozens of aircraft is pretty much impossible.
I’m familiar with LIDAR, about the only added advantage over radar it brings to the table is a more precise definition of scanned objects, like color, texture, patterns, DIMs, etc.
Yes, I’m sure you think you do. But a lot of what you say isn’t based on technology from the last ten years or with an understanding of how rapidly things are changing. For example, I bought several of these five years ago for about $10 each to fly around my house for our dogs to chase:
Mini Quadcopter Drone, F36 Mini RC Drone 2.4G 4CH 6Axis Gyro Remote Control Nano Drone
These cheap toy drones have collision avoidance built in, so when they get close to objects, walls, or ceilings, they immediately reverse course. These are five-year-old $10 drones with one tiny, garbage sensor.
Again, these five-year-old $10 toy drones do collision avoidance.
Now, regarding LIDAR, the most important thing it’ll do for passenger drones is collision avoidance. It can “see” in conditions that cameras can not, which adds another strong layer of safety in addition to what cameras can see.
Additionally, passenger drones will have transponders that will communicate with other nearby drones to manage traffic.
None of the safety stuff is complicated, even with old tech.