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Ford Pumps Cash Into Company Creating Maps for Self-Driving Cars

posted by cmn32480 on Monday July 18 2016, @08:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the how-much-to-update-them dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Ford is already deeply involved with these sorts of investments, but its portfolio is growing once again with an investment in a company building maps for self-driving cars.

Civil Maps' goal is to create a set of high definition maps that self-driving cars can use to navigate. The company takes data from Lidar and cameras and translates it into a format cars can understand. It prides itself on having a small data footprint, making it easier to transmit data to and from vehicles.

"Autonomous vehicles require a totally new kind of map," said Civil Maps CEO Sravan Puttagunta in a statement. "Civil Maps' scalable map generation process enables fully autonomous vehicles to drive like humans do -- identifying on-road and off-road features even when they might be missing, deteriorated or hidden from view and letting a car know what it can expect along its route."

The company received $6.6 million in seed funding from Ford and five other investors. Civil Maps isn't a large company, with just 16 employees on the payroll. Ford's other recent work with startups includes a $182.2 million investment in software company Pivotal, and its Ford Fusion sedan is the basis for an autonomous test car Uber has deployed in Pennsylvania.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 18 2016, @06:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 18 2016, @06:24PM (#376287)

    Perhaps such road info should shared between all manufacturers. Otherwise, mistakes and hazards could go unreported to other makers.

    I realize the competitive incentive may go down if sharing is required, but it also doesn't make economic sense for multiple companies to reinvent the data wheel. We are not talking about building TV's or towel holders, but car infrastructure where people can die if there are data gaps.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 18 2016, @07:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 18 2016, @07:18PM (#376322)

    Ford and GM share an automatic transmission (or two?) -- developed jointly, then tuned by the respective companies for different models. Most likely car hardware (which is mostly invisible to the customer) will be shared first.

    Anything that looks like intellectual property or user interface might not be shared as freely?

  • (Score: 2) by Max Hyre on Tuesday July 26 2016, @05:17PM

    by Max Hyre (3427) <{maxhyre} {at} {yahoo.com}> on Tuesday July 26 2016, @05:17PM (#380364)
          Could the auto companies gain lots of (much-needed?) kudos by putting the info into OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org]. Unfortunately, ISTM that it would take too much checking for them to import from OSM.

          Well, I can dream, can't I?