Owning the Data is the Next Step in Fully Autonomous Driving

Imagine being able to step inside the back seat of your vehicle and tell it you want it to take you to a specific destination and that happening without you ever needing to get behind the wheel. Imagine even more a vehicle that doesn’t even have a steering wheel for a human driver, but uses the cabin space to create a social environment where you can sit around a table and talk with your family and friends while the car does the driving for you. This is currently a far off dream, but we seem to be getting closer to it on a daily basis.

While nearly every single car company in the world is working to create some form of autonomous driving it seems the need to own the data that’s collected and downloaded to vehicles is important to creating a self-driving experience that is flawless. We already know the sensors and systems used for any form of self-driving will use radar, cameras and LIDAR to see the world around them, but this is really only half of the equation to the driving experience and offering a fully autonomous driving vehicle.

What’s going to happen when a car encounters a snow storm and lines are blurred? How will a car react to wet conditions and lane lines that are covered by either water or debris? Are crews going to work around the clock to keep lane lines always painted on roads? What about roads that have been recently paved and the lines haven’t been painted on yet, how will these cars navigate those roads? As it turns out this is where the actual mapped out data comes into play and will help these vehicles navigate their way around the roads and streets of your area.

Recently BMW, Daimler and Audi partnered together to acquire HERE. HERE is a digital mapping company that has been mapping out the global roadways for many years. This purchase cost the three brand $3.1 billion but it seems this would be an investment in the future of autonomous driving. HERE is headed by Edzard Overbeek who has been in the IT business for over thirty years and was a top executive at Cisco for the past fifteen years. It seems he is the right man for the job of mapping out the world in more than just a three dimensional way.

HERE uses vehicles with spinning tower sensors atop them to capture the images and details of every road we would travel on. This data is captured in 16.8 megapixel images and is precise up to two centimeters for accuracy. With about 400 vehicles providing these images on a daily basis the collection of data is at about 700,000 data points per second which is reviewed by a team of close to 3,000 specialists who are based in Mumbai, India. This data is then sold to companies such as Garmin, Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon.

This data collection process allows cars with HERE based navigation systems to have some of the most advanced mapping on the market today. The question I have regarding this system is what happens when the landscape changes but the HERE cars haven’t been back to update the maps? While it sounds like the HERE system is more advanced than the Google Maps (we’ve all seen the Google cars driving around and some of us have even gotten our faced on the Street View provided by Google when these cars have captured images) but construction is continuous and constant, making it difficult to have a complete mapping of an area.

Originally the thought with self-driving vehicles was that these vehicles would be able to review the landscape and provide an accurate accounting of the lanes and roads the car is prepared to drive on. Now the need is to own the maps, but these maps could become outdated with continuous changes to the landscape making it hard to rely on this technology for our travels to and from our home or office. Certainly we will need an updated way to show mapping when changes are made before we can do away with the steering wheel and need for human driving, but HERE is a step forward for autonomous driving.