All of which can be dealt with without having you LIDAR knowing the exact number of millimeters between you and everything else. Half of them GPS already handles.
It’s a lot easier than you want it to be. Remember, drunk people can do this, just not very well. We don’t need to throw Deep Blue at a problem that can be accomplished by your average drunk.
You don’t understand what Google is using LIDAR for. Think in terms of facial recognition. It uses a cloud of points to identify “traffic cone”.
So no, it is not using the LIDAR to try and gain any sort of high precision. It is using it to map the world around the car, and simplify it - again into ‘blocks’. And in a GIS type way, they are assigning ‘attributes’ to the block, which have a ‘library’ of possibly actions that the block might take.
Since you have stated that GPS could handle half of the examples from my morning commute, I have a simple question:
Name one.
Name one of the events from my morning commute that GPS can handle. And explain in detail how GPS would work through the situation.