Precision Mapping - Critical for the Future of Autonomous Driving

Photo Credit: USHR, Inc.

DroneView Technologies has emerged as a leader in precision mapping solutions for enterprise customers throughout the United States.

While drones are the right tool in some cases, there are many situations in which other tools are able to achieve a better result. As such, DroneView Technologies now utilizes many different platforms and sensors in addition to our multi rotor and fixed wing RTK/PPK drones including piloted aircraft and helicopters for image and LiDAR acquisition, mobile LiDAR, thermal and bathymetric sensors.

Autonomous driving is an emerging industry that is and will be dependent on precision mapping.

Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal recently discussed “The Key to Autonomous Driving? An Impossibly Perfect Map. Self-driving cars may eventually work together to create nearly real-time maps. But we’re not there yet.’

Excerpts from his October 11th article follow.

“To achieve the dream of autonomous vehicles and robots, it’s going to take much more than computer vision and artificial intelligence. Cars, drones, delivery bots, even our vacuum cleaners and robot chefs are going to need something that our ancestors developed millions of years ago: a sense of place.

“I definitely don’t think people understand how reliant autonomous cars are on the fidelity of the map,” says Mary Cummings, a professor of mechanical, electrical and computer engineering at Duke University. “If the map is wrong then the car is going to do something wrong.”…

“That self-driving cars—and eventually, all other forms of autonomous robots—require such a map has big implications for who will need to partner with whom in the autonomous driving space. It implies a great deal of collaboration, or at least licensing, because the amount of data and engineering required to build these maps is so gargantuan.”

“….maps are so critical to self-driving….”

The full story can be found at Wall Street Journal