Informer schreef op 30 december 2015 08:36:
Toyota enters map making business
geoawesomeness.com/toyota-enters-map-...December 30, 2015
It has been a very interesting year for the mapping industry. Apple has launched it’s own mapping cars, Uber acquired Mapping cars department from Microsoft, Tesla announced it’s own mapping technology and finally HERE has been acquired by a consortium of German car makers.
I thought that nothing more can surprise me this year but I was wrong… Last week Toyota announced that it is developing its own mapping technology. It will be revealed at the CES 2016 in Las Vegas next month but we already know a couple of details.
The system uses data from cameras and GPS units installed in production cars. Newly sold models but also in a number of Toyota cars already on the roads today. The images and GPS data gathered will be uploaded to Toyota data centers, “where it is automatically pieced together, corrected and updated to generate high precision road maps that cover a wide area,” according to the Toyota press release.
Toyota claims that using its own production cars to gather data will allow creating more accurate maps than using dedicated mapping cars like Google, TomTom, Here, Apple and Uber. It argues that this approach will allow for real-time updating of maps, and will be more cost-effective than road survey using a fleet of expensive vehicles full of sensors.
The truth is that similar mapping technologies are already in use.
TomTom has patented a technology called
“bird’s eye mosaic” which generates a similar output based on mapping car images. In practice it’s a very useful data layer but still one of many used for high-resolution map making required for autonomous cars. Today uploading images/videos from millions of cars, processing, detecting changes and editing a map is a process which still requires a lot of human activity. But in the perspective of 5-10 years this is how the future will look like and Toyota envisions it. I look forward to CES to learn all the details.