The corporate venturing and innovation business of Hyundai, CRADLE, is investing in fleet safety management software company Netradyne. In return, Hyundai will be able to access its more than 350 million miles of detailed road data.
Netradyne uses AI vision-based dashcam devices to monitor the safety performance of fleet vehicles. The data from these devices, reinforced with crowdsourced road and driving behavior metadata, will support the creation of HD maps and map updates. HD maps are essential for Level 3+ autonomous vehicles.
Normally, HD maps are created using mobile mapping system (MMS) vehicles, but the cost of running these specially outfitted vehicles can be prohibitive. Netradyne’s devices are more cost-efficient and are currently equipped to numerous vehicle fleets throughout the USA.
Netradyne has already captured and analyzed over 1 million unique miles of the 2.7 million miles of paved roads in the USA. This data includes several passes over the same roads to log how driving and road conditions may change throughout the year.
“Netradyne has advanced vision-based and AI-driven technology for managing the safety of drivers and fleets,” said John Suh, vice president of Hyundai CRADLE. “These systems can be leveraged as a reliable, high-quality crowdsourcing platform to support updating HD maps at a frequency high enough to support L3 autonomous vehicles.”
“We’re very pleased to announce this partnership with Hyundai CRADLE,” commented Avneesh Agrawal, founder and CEO of Netradyne. “At Netradyne, our goal has always been to make the world a safer place to drive with our advanced AI platform.”