Swarms of Mobile Scanners

Velodyne’s Puck is latest in a series of technological advancements which bring autonomous cars closer to reality. This medium-range, lightweight and cost effective LiDAR sensor is certainly attractive for many automotive manufacturers and system integrators.

At civil maps one of our objectives is to enable autonomous robots with location information concerning pseudo-static assets. In simpler terms, autonomous cars depend on prior knowledge of routes since they cannot perform all of the processing on the spot.

The opportunity does not stop here however. As more car manufacturers adopt laser scanning for autonomous application we can start considering these vehicles as robot swarms, which combine sensing, communication, and computation. Swarms of cars will then audit our maps to find, report and correct inconsistencies.