DRIVE

We’re helping make self-driving cars a reality with North America’s largest digital road database.

Overcoming sensor limitations with precision 3D roads

Autonomous driving is the cutting edge of technology and is heralding perhaps the most significant transformation in the automotive industry in decades – but more importantly is signaling a fundamental change in the way we live. People born in 2016 may never have to learn to drive. It seems hard to believe in many ways – but this is enabled by an incredible collection of technologies, and a massive amount of innovation. The industry is extremely dynamic and the race between all major automotive companies is on. With the combination of sensing technology and artificial intelligence to interpret the conditions surrounding the car progressing fast, new options are available for cars to operate completely independently – even with changing conditions around it.

While some of the technology is already well accepted in regular passenger vehicles today – radar parking sensing, adaptive cruise control, and even lane warning systems, actually getting the car to drive itself requires a paradigm shift in technology. But what happens when these sensor limitations are tested – by corners, by visibility challenges, by weather threats such as snow or even simply by speed of which those decisions controlling the car need to be made? This is where a Digital Road provides a significant source of data which provides a 3D world for the car’s control system to navigate safely and smoothly – beyond the sensor limitations.

North America’s Largest Digital Road

The Digital Road has billions of datapoints captured with lasers and cameras to a level of detail that is more accurate than many engineering surveys used to build the roads and infrastructure itself. This immense level of detail provides the most accurate 3D representation of the environment possible.