Volkswagen and Mobileye join forces to revolutionise autonomous driving

Both companies have reached an agreement to develop an autonomous driving system that could become a benchmark for the automotive industry.

Volkswagen and Mobileye have reached an agreement to launch a new navigation standard that would facilitate autonomous driving. From 2018, Volkswagen models will use Mobileye’s Road Experience Management (REM) localisation and mapping technology. This agreement is the first of its kind to combine data from different car manufacturers on a global scale with the aim of creating a single “high-definition world map”. This method could become a standard for the entire industry.

The Israeli company Mobileye is one of the leading global manufacturers of accident prevention and autonomous driving technology. Thanks to the agreement reached between that company and Volkswagen, German vehicles will use the Road Experience Management (REM) system to generate real-time data, obtain precise localisation and acquire high-definition road data.

In practice, REM works as follows: Volkswagen cars, equipped with front cameras, obtain information on lane markings and the road through Mobileye’s optical sensor systems; this information is then sent in compressed format to the cloud using crowdsourcing (collecting data from multiple vehicles). The data obtained from these vehicles is used to continuously optimise high-definition navigation maps with precise localisation capabilities. These maps serve as the basis for autonomous driving, as well as for the advanced development of many assistance systems.

“The future of autonomous driving depends on the ability to create and maintain precise high-definition maps and scale them at minimal cost. The agreement with Volkswagen is a turning point. It not only establishes the use of crowdsourcing to automatically generate high-definition maps and scale them economically. A much more important aspect of this agreement is that it constitutes a collaborative framework for the entire industry. The idea is that manufacturers are able to jointly produce map content, information that is necessary for autonomous driving,” says Professor Amnon Shashua, co-founder and CTO of Mobileye.

For its part, Frank Welsch, head of development on the Volkswagen Board of Management, said following the agreement with Mobileye: “Every day, millions of Volkswagen vehicles drive on our roads. Many of them are equipped with sensors that monitor the environment. We now have the capability to use all this information to obtain various anonymous data on traffic, road conditions or available parking spaces. We can make this constantly updated data available to systems. In the future, new services are planned that will be able to use this data and greatly facilitate driving and mobility, improving comfort and efficiency. This collaborative work will benefit all drivers, not just Volkswagen customers.”

Source: Newspress