Without good Cards Automated cars are likely to have difficulty orienting themselves. Bosch is now working on suitable data - and is making use of swarm intelligence.
Europe VW-Golf Fleet maps the continent. The supplier Bosch is now using the current generation of vehicles together with the northern German manufacturer for automated data collection. The information from the camera, radar and vehicle dynamics systems will be used to create high-resolution digital maps for automated driving. These should come into effect from 2023.
The vehicle collects the data without any action on the part of the driver and sends it to a cloud, where it is stored and compared with the input from other cars. The resulting “map signature” contains not only the course of the road but also traffic signs, landmarks and topographical data. In future, it will enable the vehicle to self-localize to the nearest decimeter - an important prerequisite for the car's orientation in automated operation.
The VW Golf is said to be just the first model in a whole fleet of data collectors. With around 23.000 units sold, the compact model was the best-selling model on the continent in the first five months of the year. According to Bosch, more vehicles will follow.