Civil Maps Is Getting Every US Road Ready for Self-Driving Cars

By PCMag

The startup is creating road schematics accurate to within 10 centimeters.

The suburban streets of Albany, Calif., were mostly empty on a recent sunny mid-afternoon. Of the few motorists who were on the road, many were scowling at a white Subaru Outback with a spinning radar antenna bolted to its roof and decals reading “Civil Maps” plastered on its side.

The Subaru was driven by Anuj Gupta, co-founder of Civil Maps and a visiting scholar in artificial intelligence at the nearby University of California-Berkeley. He was demonstrating a mapping technology that he hopes automakers will pay big money for: software that can transform raw 3D data from LiDAR (high-resolution laser imaging), cameras, and other sensors on autonomous vehicles into a machine-readable format.

“We are the cognition layer for autonomous cars,” Gupta said. Civil Maps has already recorded every permanent street light, stop sign, lane marking, and other road signals in Albany and a few other cities in the Bay Area, and is now setting its sights on the rest of America.

It’s a sort of backdoor approach to creating machine-readable schematics of every mile of major roadways in the US. There are around 6 million of those miles, Gupta said, and it would be impractical for his company to drive all of them in the way that Google Street View has set out to do.