Mapping startup for autonomous cars aims to automate cities
Carmera, which launched last year, operates an owned and professionally crowdsourced vehicular sensor network that gathers continually updated 3D scene, change detection, and analytics data using LiDAR-equipped vehicles. In addition to the latest funding, the company announced a real-time event management engine and a potential data-sharing partnership with New York City.
The latest funding was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) with participation from previous investors including Matrix Partners. With this latest funding round, says the company, it is “more committed than ever to maintaining the world’s most robust and accessible street intelligence platform, as a top-tier, independent AV supplier built for the long term.”
As part of this, the company unveiled a new real-time event and change management engine that it says propagates critical updates to the core vectors of HD base maps within minutes instead of months, as has been the norm. The system is now being deployed in varied and complicated environments around the world, the company says, including New York, San Francisco, Seoul, and Tokyo,
The system includes events that have “outsized impact on ETA and disengagements” like construction and police activity, as well as critical inventory and intersection control changes such as traffic signals, turn restrictions, lane markings, and more. The company provides API access to this data at all stages, including initial detection in milliseconds, classification within seconds, and fully validated “virtual rails” and traffic annotations redrawn in the base map within minutes.
“In designing this system,” says the company, “we learned a lot from our customers who are serious about commercial services – not just R&D or PR demos – and were frustrated by standard definition or incumbent mapping solutions that take months or quarters to update a simple feature. These companies range from fast-moving startups focused on underserved communities, to some of the largest auto OEMs and mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) companies, with large-scale production in mind all over the world.”
The company’s new prospective partnership with New York City will begin with Carmera sharing data with the NYC DOT, including historical pedestrian density analytics and real-time construction detection events. The company says that it is also exploring how the city can provide access to key city data sets that allow all parties to work together to improve the accuracy of street inventories.
Michael Replogle, Deputy Commissioner for Policy, NYC Department of Transportation adds, “New York City has the most complex street environment in the country, and with continued growth in population, employment, and construction, our streets and sidewalks are only getting busier. The ability to collect and analyze high-quality data about pedestrian volumes and traffic events in real time could be very useful in DOT’s work managing our transportation system and designing streets for people. We are exploring a potential data-sharing partnership with Carmera to see how their tools can support this work.”
Carmera says that it is extending this model to other municipalities as well. Working with governments, and more generally the broader AV ecosystem, says the company, has been a key theme for it this year.
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