**Bashar Alsadik**

Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands; b.s.a.alsadik@utwente.nl

Received: 13 January 2020; Accepted: 4 February 2020; Published: 5 February 2020

**Abstract:** Lidar technology is thriving nowadays for different applications mainly for autonomous navigation, mapping, and smart city technology. Lidars vary in different aspects and can be: multi beam, single beam, spinning, solid state, full 360 field of view FOV, single or multi pulse returns, and many other geometric and radiometric aspects. Users and developers in the mapping industry are continuously looking for new released Lidars having high properties of output density, coverage, and accuracy while keeping a lower cost. Accordingly, every Lidar type should be well evaluated for the final intended mapping aim. This evaluation is not easy to implement in practice because of the need to have all the investigated Lidars available in hand and integrated into a ready to use mapping system. Furthermore, to have a fair comparison; it is necessary to ensure the test applied in the same environment at the same travelling path among other conditions. In this paper, we are evaluating two state-of-the-art multi beam Lidar types: Ouster OS-1-64 and Hesai Pandar64 for mapping applications. The evaluation of the Lidar types is applied in a simulation environment which approximates reality. The paper shows the determination of the ideal orientation angle for the two Lidars by assessing the density, coverage, and accuracy and presenting clear performance quantifications and conclusions.

**Keywords:** Lidar; point cloud density; point cloud coverage; mobile mapping systems; 3D simulation; Pandar64; Ouster OS-1-64
