"""
"""
Peter Skillman, lead designer for Nokia HERE, the maps division [...] visited WIRED’s San Francisco office recently to talk about HERE’s efforts to build high definition maps for autonomous vehicles. [...] Autonomous cars will require maps that differ in several important ways from the maps we use today for turn-by-turn directions. They need to be hi-def. Meter-resolution maps may be good enough for GPS-based navigation, but autonomous cars will need maps that can tell them where the curb is within a few centimeters. They also need to be live, updated second by second with information about accidents, traffic backups, and lane closures.
[...OZ: of course, all of it is stupid...]
Like typical digital maps HERE is using satellite and aerial imagery [...] “probe data” from GPS devices inside fleet vehicles owned by trucking companies and other partners. This data, which HERE collects at a rate of 100 billion points per month, contains information about the direction and speed of traffic on roads and highways. But the most detailed information being fed into the maps comes from hundreds of cars outfitted with GPS, cameras, and lidar,
[...]
This fleet is coordinated from a nondescript building two blocks from the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The sensors on the cars were developed by John Ristevski, a 38-year-old Australian native. Ristevski is HERE’s head of reality capture, a job title reminiscent of the famous story by Jorge Luis Borges about a 1:1 scale map that is exactly as big as the area it covers. The map Ristevski and his colleagues are creating has similar aspirations.

When the car is in motion [...] An inertial sensor tracks the pitch, roll, and yaw of the car so that the lidar data can be corrected for the position of the car and used to create a 3-D model of the roads it has traveled. The lidar instrument’s range tops out about 10-15 stories above the street. At street level, its resolution is just a few centimeters.

Lane markers and street signs stand out in the lidar imagery because they’re coated with reflective paint. HERE uses a combination of computer vision algorithms and manual labor to extract this information and check it against imagery from the cars’ cameras (much like Google extracts similar information from its Street View imagery.)

HERE has outfitted roughly 200 cars with the sensor system Ristevski designed, and the company has a similar number of cars with an older generation of equipment. [...] All told, HERE has driven 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) in 30 countries on 6 continents, all in the last 15 months. Google, HERE’s main competitor in the race to build maps for autonomous cars, has focused its efforts close to home, reportedly mapping 2,000 miles around its headquarters in Mountain View. (The US road network, for comparison, covers 4 million miles).
[...]
HD maps will tell an autonomous car what to expect along its route, Ristevski says. “If you just have a bunch of sensors on the car that detect things in real time and no a priori information about what exists, the problem becomes a lot harder,” he said. “The maps are essential.” [OZ: no]

3D model of New Orleans based on Nokia Here LIDAR data
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75yJUW91lTs
[...]
According to Peter Skillman, it could take several seconds for a car in San Francisco to beam its data to a data center in, say, North Carolina, and get a response. Getting response times down to tens of milliseconds—fast enough for a car to switch lanes to avoid some debris in the road spotted by another car ahead of it—will require applications that live inside the LTE networks and can be accessed locally, Skillman says. [OZ: stupid]
[...]
The key to getting people to trust autonomous cars, Skillman says, is having the experience match their expectations. If the car signals ahead of time that it’s about to change lanes to avoid some debris, and then does exactly that, it will start to gain the trust of its passengers, he says.

Skillman pulled up a few examples on his laptop, short clips that showed the kind of map you’d see in the console of a car with an onboard navigation system. In one, an animated arrow popped up on a map to indicate an impending lane change. In another, yellow brackets and an exclamation point highlighted a man walking near the side of the road—thereby alerting passengers to the possibility of a sudden move to avoid him.
"""
https://www.wired.com/2014/12/nokia-here-autonomous-car-maps/
https://www.wired.com/2014/12/nokia-here-autonomous-car-maps

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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