I M A G E F R O M G E N E R I C L O G I C / G E N L O G I C . C O M

necessary to store a detailed 3D repre-
sentation of the environment. For colli-
sion-free motion planning, on the oth-
er hand, a denser representation of the
occupied and free areas is necessary.”
Mutz says the resolution of the grid
used in the experimental vehicle-based
mapping system built by a team at IFES
is set to 20cm. “We plan to reduce the
map resolution to 15cm in the near
future, and our group considers 10cm
the ideal resolution for safe operation
in highly cluttered urban areas at rea-
sonable speeds,” he adds.

Mapping companies such as Google, HERE, and Tom Tom are using fleets of similar vehicles armed with cameras and LIDAR sensors to map the roads they travel. Still, the level of detail needed for motion planning requires an immense effort.

Alain De Taeye, head of high-definition (HD) mapping at Tom Tom, said at the European leg of nVidia’s GTC technology conference in Amsterdam: “We have mapped 47. 1 million kilometers of road, but only 120,000 kilometers is mapped in HD. And we are leading the pack. We have basic information

REAL-TIME COMMUNICATION and collaboration lie at the heart of a new generation of high-definition (HD) digital maps that react quickly to changes in the real world. Autonomous vehicles and construction-site surveys are among the applications that are driving companies toward high-pre-cision mapping performed almost in real time.

James Dean, founder and direc-
tor of technology applications at
London, U.K.-based startup SenSat,
says, “Digitizing the world is incred-
ibly important. We can make better,
faster decisions from that digitized
information than is possible with tra-
ditional means”
Early adopters of SenSat’s map-
ping technology come from the road-
construction industry, a sector that
today mainly relies on manual surveys
conducted at ground level. Surveys can
take as long as six weeks and, as a re-
sult, can only be performed infrequent-
ly during a project. A pillar built a foot
out of place that is only discovered at a
relatively late stage can set the project
back weeks, but by sending out small,
lightweight drones as flying cameras
to scan the site on a daily basis, proj-
ect managers can spot mistakes in the
three-dimensional (3D) map long be-
fore they become a costly issue.

Regulations currently limit the area that drones can cover, which suits focused construction projects such as bridges over freeways and intersections. However, larger-scale applications, such as a proposed expansion of the capacity of one of the U.K.’s busiest roads—the M4 motorway—will require surveys to be conducted over many miles and months.

“Today, you have to keep the drone within the line of sight of the operator; that limits you to coverage of around 1km2 per hour. For economical use, you really want 20km2 per hour,” Dean says.

Still, the U.K. government is be-
ginning to look favorably on changes
to regulations that would give survey
drones greater autonomy to support
projects such as the M4 expansion, he
says. “At the moment, it’s a supportive
environment. We think it will only get
better from here.”
Users of these roads, as vehicles
become more autonomous, will need
similarly detailed mapping to be car-
ried out on a near-real-time basis. Al-
though an autonomous vehicle could
scan only its surroundings to see where
it can drive, practical systems will use
HD maps to perform the task of local-
ization. “Using the map, we figure out
where we are on the road,” says Jen-
Hsun Huang, cofounder and CEO of
graphics-processor company nVidia.
“We want to test whether our under-
standing of the world is consistent with
what is around the car.”
Filipe Mutz, associate professor of
information systems at Federal Univer-
sity of Espírito Santo (IFES) in Vitória,
Brazil, says the level of detail required
in the map depends on its intended
use: “For feature-based localization
systems, a map can be represented by
a sparse set of features, and it is not

Digitizing the World
Digital maps trawl for real-time updates.

Technology | DOI: 10.1145/3048385 Chris Edwards

Command and Control Technologies Corp.’s C3I Surveillance Toolkit provides real-time tracking and geo-referencing of targets of interest, as well as providing control and monitoring for a network of sensor systems.