Test station to characterize the emission of a LiDAR.

A test station setup devised to measure the emission characteristics and beam propagation parameters of a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system is presented. The main blocks of the station to measure the accessible emission, wavelength peak and FWHM, pulse duration, pulse repetition rate, horizontal and vertical angular resolution, field of view, beam propagation factor M 2, beam waist size, waist location, and divergence are described. The performance of this test station was demonstrated using a commercial spinning LiDAR, a Velodyne VLP-16, which successfully enables these measurements for a laser beam with a wavelength of 913 nm.