Mobileye & HERE Partnering For Crowdsourced HD Mapping To Be Used In Autonomous Vehicle Applications

The tech firm HERE and Mobileye, the self-driving tech firm perhaps best known for its previous work with Tesla, have announced that they are partnering to link “their respective autonomous driving technologies into an enhanced industry-leading offering for automakers.”

The new strategic partnership will involve a number of different collaborative initiatives, including:

• the integration of Mobileye’s RoadbookTM with HERE HD Live Map;
• the utilization of the HERE Open Location Platform by Mobileye; and
• the utilization of Mobileye’s raw sensor and observation data by HERE; amongst other possibilities.

A press release provides details on these collaborations:

• “Mobileye’s RoadbookTM will be integrated as a data layer in HERE HD Live Map, HERE’s real-time cloud service for partially, highly, and fully automated vehicles. RoadbookTM information will provide an important additional layer of real-time contextual awareness by gathering landmark and roadway information to assist in making a vehicle more aware of — and better able to react to — its surroundings, as well as allow for more accurate vehicle positioning on the road.”
• “Mobileye will utilize the HERE Open Location Platform for the ingestion and processing of raw sensor and observation data (Road Segment Data, RSD), and the creation and dynamic maintenance of its RoadbookTM products. The HERE Open Location Platform is the next generation of HERE’s location platform, developed to support the ingestion, enrichment and processing of real-time location-based data for multiple industries, including the automotive industry.”
• “HERE will utilize RSD, as well as the Global RoadbookTM (GLRB), collected and aggregated from certain vehicle brands equipped with Mobileye technology to support change detection and the maintenance of HERE HD Live Map. Detecting changes in the real world and adjusting the map accordingly is critically important for automated vehicles to plan better driving strategies. With more sensor data available from car manufacturers equipped with Mobileye’s REMTM technology, the HERE HD Live Map will be updated even more quickly, achieving very short Time to Reflect Reality.”

These 3 collaborations are identified by the press release as just the primary/initial collaborations. The two firms will apparently also be exploring “other potential opportunities where their products and services are complementary” — with the aim being to move closer towards the achievement of fully autonomous vehicle capability.

The Chairman and CTO of Mobileye, Professor Amnon Shashua, commented on the partnership: “High-definition mapping is a key enabler for autonomous driving. Mobileye’s REMTM technology, enabling crowd-sourced data extraction, together with the backend processing of the RoadbookTM combined with HERE HD Live Map is critical to ensure dynamic, near real-time updates. We are pleased to work with HERE to create a ‘world HD-map’ standard, leveraging the combined fleet size of certain vehicle brands initially, with the objective of eventually launching an industry wide initiative.”