TomTom (TOM2) announced that, in a single month, it has made 1.5 billion changes to its digital maps which are delivered to TomTom customers on a weekly basis. The milestone is key to the company’s mission to shape the future of mobility in a world that increasingly relies on digital... Read more →


Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH (RBVC), the corporate venture capital company of the Bosch Group, has completed an investment in US-based startup DeepMap. DeepMap is a software company focused on solving the mapping and localization challenge for autonomous vehicles. (Earlier post.) Maps explicitly designed to be read by machines are... Read more →


Renovo and HERE Technologies form partnership to further open interfaces in automated mobility

 An open ecosystem of best-in-class technologies working seamlessly together will be at the heart of the automated transportation systems of the future. That is the shared vision of Renovo, a mobility software technology company, and mapping and location services company HERE Technologies have entered into a partnership to deploy open... Read more →


Civil Maps, creator of the world’s first edge-based HD mapping and localization platform for self-driving cars (earlier post), has teamed up with Renovo, the software technology company behind AWare (earlier post), to provide highly automated vehicle makers and technology providers with seamless access to Civil Maps’ vehicular cognition stack. Through... Read more →


BMW and Daimler to bring HERE HD Live Map to future models; “self-healing maps”

The BMW Group and Daimler will each make HERE HD Live Map an integral part of their future highly automated and autonomous vehicles (SAE levels 3-5). Both companies, which are some of the co-owners of HERE, already use maps from HERE in their current vehicles. Extremely precise digital maps are... Read more →


TomTom introduces autonomous driving technology; partnerships with Baidu, Qualcomm

At CES, TomTom (TOM2) launched two technologies to support autonomous driving: TomTom AutoStream—a map delivery service that enables vehicles to build a horizon for the road ahead by streaming the latest map data from the TomTom cloud—and TomTom MotionQ, a predictive driving concept to ensure the comfort of passengers in... Read more →


LG Electronics and HERE Technologies partner on autonomous cars; next-generation telematics strategy

LG Electronics is partnering with HERE Technologies (HERE), a global provider of digital mapping and location services, to offer a next-generation telematics solution for autonomous vehicles. The solution combines LG‘s advanced telematics technology with high-precision map data and location services powered by the HERE Open Location Platform. Through their planned... Read more →


Audi displays new AI project at NIPS: mono camera with semantic segmenting and depth estimates creates precise 3D model of environment

Audi is exhibiting an innovative pre-development project to support autonomous driving at the NIPS 2017 conference in Long Beach, California, this week. A project team from the Audi subsidiary Audi Electronics Venture (AEV) developed a mono camera that uses artificial intelligence to generate an extremely precise 3D model of the... Read more →


HERE and Mitsubishi Electric to partner on advanced location services for autonomous vehicles

HERE Technologies and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (MELCO) intend to link their advanced location technologies for autonomous vehicles into a powerful integrated service offering for automakers. According to their preliminary agreement, the companies aim to offer services to support cars with ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) on the road today right... Read more →


Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has been conducting expressway-based field testing of its xAUTO vehicle and related autonomous-driving technologies for self-sensing and network-based driving since May 2016. The xAUTO will be exhibited during 45th Tokyo Motor Show 2017 later this month. Mitsubishi Electric named its autonomous driving technologies “Diamond Safety.” Mitsubishi Electric’s... Read more →


Ushr locks in $10M Series A funding; HD mapping technology for autonomous vehicles; working with GM

Ushr Inc., a developer of high-definition (HD) mapping technology and software for autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles, has secured $10 million in Series A funding, commensurate with its spin-off from GeoDigital, Inc. Forté Ventures led the investment round with participation from EnerTech Capital, Emerald Technology Ventures, and GM Ventures. Drawing on... Read more →


At the end of 2015, Audi AG, the BMW Group and Daimler AG purchased HERE Technologies, a leading software company for high-resolution digital navigation maps and location-based services, from Nokia. (Earlier post.) HERE is designed as an open platform; since its takeover by the automaker consortium, the company has steadily... Read more →


HERE Technologies has launched the new generation of its HERE Real-Time Traffic service—the first global service on the market that integrates live vehicle sensor data from Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz vehicles with traffic probe information, resulting in significantly higher accuracy and more precise information about traffic conditions. HERE Real-Time Traffic,... Read more →


Bosch and the Dutch map and traffic information provider TomTom have developed a radar localization layer for high-resolution maps for automated driving—a first. Up to now, video data has been used for this purpose. Bosch’s “radar road signature” is made up of billions of individual reflection points. These are formed... Read more →


Engineering researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and colleagues have demonstrated a measurement approach to for urban air pollution mapping at 4–5 orders of magnitude greater spatial precision than possible with current central-site ambient monitoring. The team equipped two Google Street View vehicles with the fast-response Aclima Ei... Read more →


Cadillac Super Cruise hands-free system uses driver attention system and LiDAR map database

The 2018 Cadillac CT6 will feature Super Cruise (earlier post) autonomous driving technology for the highway. Unlike other driver assistance systems, Super Cruise utilizes two advanced technology systems—a driver attention system and precision LiDAR map data—to ensure safe and confident vehicle operation. These systems are added to the network of... Read more →


Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has developed two new technologies to support the creation and maintenance of high-precision 3D maps required for autonomous driving (earlier post): AI-based automated mapping; and the extraction of transitions in mapping landscapes. The technologies are based on the company’s own Mobile Mapping System (MMS) (earlier post) for... Read more →


Qualcomm and TomTom partner on crowdsourcing high-definition mapping data for autonomous driving

Qualcomm Technologies is working with TomTom on using the Qualcomm Drive Data Platform for high-definition (HD) map crowdsourcing, to accelerate the future of autonomous driving. Qualcomm Drive Data Platform intelligently collects and analyzes data from different vehicle sensors, supporting smarter vehicles to determine their location, monitor and learn driving patterns,... Read more →


Volkswagen and Mobileye partner on autonomous driving; REM in VWs in 2018

Volkswagen and Mobileye will implement a new navigation standard for autonomous driving starting in 2018. Future Volkswagen models will use the camera-based map and localization technology Road Experience Management (REM) from Mobileye. (Earlier post.) REM uses crowd-sourcing (data from many cars – the swarm) to generate real-time data for precise... Read more →


Qualcomm is introducing the Qualcomm Drive Data Platform to collect and analyze intelligently information from a vehicle’s sensors. Cars will be able to determine their location up to lane-level accuracy, to monitor and to learn driving patterns, to perceive their surroundings, and to share this reliable and accurate data with... Read more →


Intel to acquire 15% of HD-mapping company HERE; collaborating on technology for autonomous vehicles and IoT

Intel will purchase a 15% ownership stake in HERE, a global provider of high-definition digital maps and location-based services, from HERE’s current indirect shareholders: Audi AG, BMW AG and Daimler AG. The three automakers acquired HERE from Nokia in 2015 (earlier post) with the goal of securing the long-term availability... Read more →


Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, along with Mitsubishi Electric US, Inc., will display a future concept of the recently released new model of its Mitsubishi Mobile Mapping System, the MMS-G22, at CES 2017. The MMS-G220 is a highly accurate measuring system using car-mounted GPS antennas, laser scanners and cameras. (Earlier post.) The... Read more →


HERE and Mobileye to partner on crowd-sourced HD mapping for automated driving

High-definition (HD) mapping company HERE and Mobileye, developer of computer vision and machine learning, data analysis, localization and mapping for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and autonomous driving, plan to enter a strategic partnership that links their respective autonomous driving technologies into an enhanced industry-leading offering for automakers. Under the partnership,... Read more →


NVIDIA and TomTom developing cloud-to-car mapping system for self-driving cars; DRIVE PX 2

NVIDIA and TomTom, the Dutch mapping and navigation group, are partnering to develop artificial intelligence to create a cloud-to-car mapping system for self-driving cars. The work combines TomTom’s extensive HD map coverage, which already spans more than 120,000 km (75,000 miles) of highways and freeways, with the NVIDIA DRIVE PX... Read more →


The Nikkei reports that Tokyo-based Dynamic Map Planning (DMP), formed earlier this year by Mitsubishi Electric, mapmaker Zenrin and nine automakers, will begin creating high-definition 3-D maps for self-driving cars this month. The project is supported by the Japanese government (SIP-adus, Strategic Innovation Promotion Program Innovation of Automated Driving for... Read more →


Baidu and NVIDIA team up on cloud-to-car platform for self-driving cars; HD maps, Level 3 control, automated parking

At the Baidu World Conference in Beijing, Baidu CEO Robin Li together with NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced a partnership to use artificial intelligence (AI) in the creation of a cloud-to-car autonomous car platform for local Chinese and global car makers. NVIDIA and Baidu have a long history of working... Read more →