Cars that find themselves on a map
A company called Deepmap bills itself as a full-stack high-definition mapping service. This basically means they make maps that self-driving cars understand. Their idea is that cars themselves collect data about their surroundings as they go down the road. This data gets aggregated and sent back out to other cars to give a picture of local conditions as they change. The term for this process is localization — Self-driving cars use the Deepmap service to know precisely where they are on the road, what’s coming around the corner, when and where they can make turns, and how conditions might have changed since the last time they drove this stretch of road. Deepmap says without this kind of full-stack mapping and localization system, self-driving vehicles will not be safe enough for true autonomy.
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