Live Map Data Crucial for Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles will need more than fancy cameras and sensors to drive themselves.

At the Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress in Detroit, automakers and industry experts gathered to speak about future driving technologies, focusing on autonomous vehicles. But like every driver, self-driving cars will need to rely on maps in order to navigate to their destinations safely. According to Jim Keller, chief engineer for Honda R&D Americas Inc., autonomous vehicles will need up-to-the-minute map data so that the self-driving vehicles are able to recognize when it’s in unmapped territory.

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Creating those maps will require collaboration between automakers, map makers, technology companies and governments along with plenty of crowdsourcing, industry experts say. Vehicles and their various sensors will need to collect and share roadway data to help update maps with real-time information, similar to how mobile app Waze currently allows drivers to alert one another to upcoming road closures, speed traps and even traffic.

“Mapping is going to be critical in the future,” Keller said during an interview at the Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress here. “It’s almost a symbiotic relationship between the auto companies and what we need and what we’re asking from the maps.

Ultimately, automakers will want to develop vehicles that can learn as they go, but questions arise when a vehicle isn’t able to determine if traveling to a certain area is safe. Michigan Department of Transportation Director Kirk Steudle recalls a situation where his GPA rerouted him to someone’s driveway while in another case, a GPS led a driver into a pond. While a human driver is able to react to such scenarios, a self-driving vehicle might not be equipped to recognize that it isn’t where it needs to be.

[Source: Automotive News]