Mobileye's technological capabilities may help BMW bring this type autonomous system to market.
BMW Group and Mobileye have signed an agreement that will bring Mobileye’s Road Experience Management data generation technology into newly developed BMW Group models beginning in 2018.
The REM system developed by Mobileye can provide information like road hazards, traffic delays, weather information and even parking availability from individual vehicles, which it will pool in the cloud, and then make available to other motorists, giving them a way to supplement pre-existing static HD maps with to-the-minute info from real-world driving.
The same data could be fed to autonomous vehicle systems in the future. Crowd-sourced real-time data using vehicles equipped with camera-based Advanced Driver Assist System (ADAS) technology is a critical enabler for autonomous driving through next-generation high definition maps aimed at making driving safer and more efficient for consumers.
The BMW-Mobileye agreement is open ended and provides for industry collaboration with the goal of promoting automated driving.
(Mobileye and Delphi partner with Intel on new technology. Click Here for the story.)
BMW Group sensor data can be merged with data from different automakers, resulting in a larger scale of data used to create Mobileye’s Global RoadBook to support and rapidly update HD maps with highly accurate localization capabilities. Autonomous vehicles will require HD maps that can identify and update changes in the environment with near real-time speed enabling very short “time to reflect reality.”
The cameras that enable to collect data act as intelligent agents that, through Mobileye EyeQ processors and software, can identify information that is sent to the cloud in a highly compressed form.
The data can be used to add a dynamic layer to current and future navigation maps, enabling BMW Group customers to access true real-time information on traffic density, road hazards, weather conditions, on-street parking, and other helpful information.
(Investors betting big on autonomous technology. Click Here for the details.)
The BMW Group and Mobileye also plan to transfer anonymized data to HERE, the leading mapping and location service. HERE will use this data and information to conduct real-time updates of HERE HD Live Map, HERE’s real-time cloud service for partially, highly and fully automated vehicles
BMW’s cooperation with HERE as well as the cooperation with Intel and Mobileye on bringing highly automated driving to the streets by 2021 with the BMW iNEXT.
Mobileye’s goal is to source data from a range of different vehicle manufacturers, in order to more quickly and accurately build anonymized real-time mapping data that can serve to inform autonomous driving systems more generally, which should in theory lead to safer roads.
(To see more about BMW’s Kuhnt leading North America, Click Here.)
BMW is already working with HERE, as long with Intel and Mobileye on delivering highly automated vehicles to the road for a target 2021 timeframe, so this should help pave the way for that, with ample data connected in advance from the next few years’ worth of shipping vehicles.