ASSIST

How do self-driving cars know where they are? With our active driving assistance software.

Assisted vehicle positioning

GPS accuracy and latency can be a significant issue facing autonomous cars – everyone has had an experience taking a highway exit and the GPS taking a moment to recognize you being on an off-ramp. In autonomous driving, location inaccuracy of even 3 feet, or delay of 3 seconds can be critical.

Assist is sophisticated software that intelligently accesses the Digital Road database and estimates the vehicle’s geo-position by localizing the vehicle relative to sensed data inputs and GPS coordinates. By identifying uniquely identifiable road features – eg distance to a curve, a barrier or a road sign, Assist can triangulate a relative position using measurement and GPS. As the car moves down the road, the new road features can update the car’s position using measurement alone – overcoming the issues with GPS latency.

In the future, car-to-car positioning can be more closely guided – allowing closer and faster traffic flow.

GeoDigital’ s Assist software solution is the critical link between the vehicle control system and the road feature database providing the necessary cross check between the map and the vehicle’s sensors to ascertain absolute vehicle positioning.

Assisted driving inputs

Digital Road is not just the data points. It has critical features identified and categorized, which makes it easier for cars to quickly access information – critical to the driving experience. Software aboard the car pulls up the relevant features such road curvature, road trajectory (horizontal/vertical/slope), the lane markings, and roadside attributes. These critical spatial insights are dynamically served to the vehicle’s control system in readiness for steering, braking, speed and signaling commands. This approach provides the critical information more quickly and reliably than artificial processing alone – particularly when traveling at high speeds. This allows car manufacturers to standardize technology onboard the car, reducing the processing power and cost of onboard technologies and enhancing safety, reliability and smoothness of drive.