Civil Maps hopes to bring maps to driverless cars
Thanks to the financial backing of several major investors, a mapping technology company might soon be able to provide real-time maps for driverless cars.
After receiving a $6.6 million investment from the likes of Ford Motor Company, Stanford University nonprofit StartX, and an investment firm run by Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang, Civil Maps will look to provide driverless cars with mapping technology that can be easily learned and digested by autonomous vehicles. Civil Maps hopes to do this by using a lot of technology common to unmanned systems, including lidar, cameras and sensors.
The initiative by Civil Maps will likely mirror that of a Google mapping app called Waze. Waze allows drivers to provide updates of roads and conditions on the road. For Google’s self-driving cars, a driver can teach the car new routes for future autonomous use.
Unlike Waze, though, Civil Maps is hoping to skip the teaching element. It is the goal of the company to provide driverless cars with maps they can learn on the fly, while also allowing the cars to take into account and analyze real world data and objects such as street signs, lights and potential hazard spots. Civil Maps and its technology hopes to provide the safest trip possible for driverless cars.
From a press release published through Business Wire, CEO Sravan Puttagunta talked about the future of mapping for driverless vehicles and how he hopes his company will be at the front line of developing technology to help ease the process.
“Autonomous vehicles require a totally new kind of map,” said Puttagunta. “Civil Maps’ scalable map generation process enables fully autonomous vehicles to drive like humans do — identifying on-road and off-road features even when they might be missing, deteriorated or hidden from view and letting a car know what it can expect along its route. We are honored to work with Ford and the rest of our investor team to pave the way for fully autonomous vehicles at continental scale.”
According to an article from the Washington Post, Civil Maps is in talks with automakers in China, Japan, Korea and the United States.
