Volkswagen and Mobileye are planning to implement a new navigation standard for autonomous driving as of 2018. Future Volkswagen models will use Mobileye’s camera-based map and localization technology, Road Experience Management (REM). The two companies are to jointly collect data and utilize this for a new generation of highly intelligent maps.
REM uses crowd-sourcing (data from many cars – the swarm) to generate real-time data for precise localization and acquisition of high-definition track data. This makes REM an elementary information level for autonomous driving.
“The future of autonomous driving depends on the ability to create and maintain precise high-definition maps and scale them at minimal cost,” said professor Amnon Shashua, co-founder and CTO of Mobileye.
“The Volkswagen agreement is a turning point. It not only utilizes crowd-sourcing technology to automatically generate high-definition maps and scale them cost-effectively, but a much more important aspect is that the agreement provides a framework for industry-wide cooperation between automobile manufacturers to jointly produce the map contents that are needed for autonomous driving.”
February 21, 2017