Perhaps read that as "inexpensive" rather than "cheap" if you take cheap to imply low quality.
Light field sensors could greatly aid self-driving vehicles as a significant improvement over standard cameras and stereoscopic configurations for object detection. It's not as good as Lidar in some ways, but it's much less expensive and offers some of the same kinds of data (which means greater portability of algorithms or techniques between the two sensor types). And since cars need to see the same visual cues humans do, we need cameras anyways (for reading signs and road directions, lane detection, etc.) so using a light field sensor could offer a twofer. Improved object detection plus the ability to do visual detection we already need.
Light field sensors could greatly aid self-driving vehicles as a significant improvement over standard cameras and stereoscopic configurations for object detection. It's not as good as Lidar in some ways, but it's much less expensive and offers some of the same kinds of data (which means greater portability of algorithms or techniques between the two sensor types). And since cars need to see the same visual cues humans do, we need cameras anyways (for reading signs and road directions, lane detection, etc.) so using a light field sensor could offer a twofer. Improved object detection plus the ability to do visual detection we already need.