The most consequential code in this patent is G01S 17/58 — LiDAR that measures velocity. Blackmore's grant US11500106B2 ("LIDAR system for autonomous vehicle," issued November 15, 2022; inventors Stephen C. Crouch, Devlin Baker) is a hardware claim with a tight, three-code G01S classification, and the 17/58 code marks it as FMCW: coherent LiDAR that reads not just where a point is but how fast it's moving toward or away, per return.
Why that matters: conventional time-of-flight LiDAR gives you a position cloud and you infer velocity by differencing frames. FMCW gives you instantaneous radial velocity at every point, in a single measurement, from the Doppler shift of the coherent return. That's a categorically richer signal — and one a camera fundamentally cannot produce. The 17/894 code (3D imaging) plus 17/931 (vehicle use) round out the system claim.
For the control-and-perception beat, this is the deep-hardware end of the sensor-camp debate. Blackmore was acquired by Aurora precisely for this FMCW capability, and a system-level claim on velocity-sensing LiDAR is a commitment to a stack that vision-only architectures structurally cannot replicate. Per-point velocity changes what's possible downstream — motion segmentation and prediction get easier when the sensor hands you velocity for free.
From a portfolio angle, Blackmore-now-Aurora's FMCW patents are the moat under the velocity-LiDAR thesis. A hardware-system claim is harder to design around than an algorithm — you can't retrain your way past a claimed coherent-detection architecture. This is the kind of IP that makes an acquisition rational: you're buying a fenced capability, not just a team.
Caveats. Coherent and FMCW LiDAR has a long instrumentation prior-art history outside automotive; the grant turns on the specific system architecture in claim 1, not on FMCW as a concept. And a system claim's breadth depends on which components are recited as essential. Read the independent claim for the architectural elements it makes mandatory.
For the file: a velocity-sensing FMCW LiDAR system grant anchoring Aurora's hardware bet. Pull US11500106B2 on PatentBear, read claim 1 for the recited coherent-detection architecture, and file G01S 17/58 as the marker for the velocity-LiDAR camp.