san marco schreef op 15 mei 2015 09:08:
TomTom Road DNA: Precise Location Tech for Driverless Cars
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www.gpsbusinessnews.com/photo/art/def...TomTom Road DNA: Precise Location Tech for Driverless Cars
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When Audi travelled a self-driving A7 car concept along the 550 miles from San Francisco to Las Vegas last January for the CES trade show, it not only had a vast array of sensors onboard (including laser scanners and 3D video camera) but also a map matching technology invented by TomTom.
Because GPS and other GNSS constellations have their limitations, some years ago TomTom started to research other techniques capable of precisely locating a car on a road. The Dutch company came up with a technology - which they patented - internally called Road DNA.
The basic principle of Road DNA is that it correlates the real-time vision of cameras fitted on a car with a database of 2D pictures from both sides of the road. With that it can precisely position a car on a road at a centimeter level at high speed.
What might seem simple on paper is however quite complex in the reality; it needs to overcome several hurdles. First the image correlation algorithm has to be tolerant to road changes, for example trees with or without leafs depending on the season, snow, etc.
Second, it requires to work with a low processing power and a low latency. Third it needs to be scalable in terms of requested storage size.