CARMERA Launches Inventory Map, Provides Live Look at Road Changes for Autonomous Driving and More
Tags: Autonomous Vehicles, Autonomous Cars, Mapping, Self Driving Cars, News

CARMERA Launches Inventory Map, Provides Live Look at Road Changes for Autonomous Driving and More CARMERA Follow Jun 3 · 4 min read

CARMERA’s new Inventory Map helps consumer and HD maps stay up-to-date by providing a live feed of road changes. Part of CARMERA’s Change-as-a-Service suite, Inventory Map helps make navigation safer for autonomous and human drivers.

NEW YORK and SEATTLE, June 3, 2021 — CARMERA Inc., the enterprise road intelligence company, today announced the launch of Inventory Map, the newest component of its Change-as-a-Service dynamic map offering (“CaaS”). Built for the world’s leading consumer- and automotive-mapping companies, Inventory Map helps keep existing consumer and HD maps up-to-date by providing accurate, granular information about changes to road signs, traffic signals and other lane-level features — so called, “road inventory” — as detected by CARMERA’s network of vehicle-based sensors.

First launched in the San Francisco Bay Area with HD map provider Ushr Inc. as an initial pilot partner, CARMERA’s Inventory Map provides change data with greater speed, accuracy and detail than traditional news-aggregation and crowdsourcing services. Using best-in-class traffic-sign recognition, localization and impact analysis, Inventory Map provides specific details and the precise latitude and longitude coordinates for each change, delivering the data via an open, format-agnostic API for easy integration.

CARMERA captures the addition of traffic lights on Geary Blvd. on April 3, precisely locating the change and distinguishing it from other parts of the multi-block Geary improvement project.

“In our pilot of CARMERA’s Inventory Map, we received turnkey access to feature inventory data for all road classes — from major highways to small residential streets — across both urban and suburban driving domains, including downtown San Francisco,” said Chris Thibodeau, CEO of Ushr. “Changes to inventory were pushed live to the Inventory Map, giving us a highly dynamic view of the road; and CARMERA’s Inventory Map required no new software or hardware, making it compatible and complementary to our existing stack.”

Having an accurate, up-to-date picture of essential road signs and markings is critical for autonomous, advanced driver assistance and consumer applications — allowing for more expansive autonomous vehicle operating domains, more efficient commercial routing and more precise directions for consumer navigation. Neither traditional real-time traffic applications, incident-reporting services, nor public records provide the accuracy, detail or comprehensiveness necessary to support the full range of these applications.

For example, in the first four weeks of operation, none of the changes identified by Inventory Map had specific descriptions in public records, even though 49 percent of said changes created alterations to road rules or function.

Said Thibodeau, “With location coordinates, detailed descriptions of individual objects like signs and signals, and easy access to underlying ground truth data, CARMERA’s insights were more reliable, verifiable and actionable than the traditional products we’ve seen in the market.”

An example of select change events detected in downtown San Francisco.

“Whether it’s to help AVs navigate through work zones, help shipping companies more efficiently plan routes or make the maps app in your pocket feel more like a personal assistant, companies need to know what’s on the road when it’s on the road,” said Ro Gupta, CEO of CARMERA. “Inventory Map — and the whole CaaS suite — is designed to do just that, providing map data with the speed, scale and 4D accuracy these companies need but the mapping industry has yet to provide.”

Inventory Map joins Events Map, which was launched in 2020 and provides the real-time location of traffic-impacting events like construction at 10x the detail of the next best alternative. They will soon be joined by CARMERA’s Regenerative Map, which provides full camera-based HD map updates.

To learn more about Inventory Map and the full Change-as-a-Service offering, visit carmera.com.

ABOUT CARMERA

CARMERA is an enterprise road intelligence company that uses crowdsourcing and remote sensing technology to detect change and ensure that maps always maintain the detail and accuracy necessary to support safe, comfortable, and convenient navigation. Format-agnostic and modular, CARMERA works with the world’s leading OEMs, mobility-as-a-service companies, and mapping providers and supports an open ecosystem of hardware and cloud platforms. With a team hailing from leading mapping and computer vision institutions, and venture backing from GV (Google Ventures) and others, CARMERA is headquartered in New York City and Seattle, with satellites in San Francisco, London, Detroit and Tokyo.