Erin Baker – How Can Autonomous Vehicles Work In Britain?

HERE, which has been working with Daimler, Toyota and BMW, has been busy mapping London, ready for public trials of autonomous vehicles next year.

The company uses something called LiDAR (Light detection and ranging) technology to form maps with three layers of detailed information, that together build up the complete picture for vehicles to navigate by.
First is an HD layer, sketching out lane geometry and boundaries. This will tell a car whether it can travel in a particular lane, for example, or what the speed limit is on a road, and give information about the surrounding roads and lanes.

Next down the strata of information is a “live roads” layer, which tells the vehicle about temporary things like congestion ahead, roadworks or adverse weather that might mean a change in driving style is required, such as ice on the road.

The third layer uses data from human driving behaviour to predict what the car’s next movements should be, or, to make it act in a more “human” way. For example, just because the speed limit on a road is 60mph, it doesn’t necessarily mean the car should be driving at 60mph.

The maps have got all their information from vehicles driving all over the globe, assimilating street level, panoramic and 360-degree imaging. IN the UK alone they cover 65,000 miles a year.

At the top of the vehicles sits a whopping 5ft rig. A small cylinder, like a fizzy-drinks can, spins rapidly as the car is travelling along. It’s the LiDar sensor itself, capturing 700,000 3D data sections a second. It captures detail like the edge of a curb or height of a tree and works within a margin of error that’s 10cm (which is quite amazing when you consider how much data there is to capture, but slightly worrying in that any margin of error when driving is unwelcome).

All this data can be shared by manufacturers; HERE has developed maps for 200 countries and every three seconds a new car is fitted with the mapping, meaning more than 10million new cars a year.

And, of course, it’s not just new data for the new generation of self-driving cars; it’s the same data that’s already needed and used by cars with systems such as lane-keeping and active cruise control.

That brave new world is already here, people, but panic ye not: cleverer people than I are out there, charting our course to the horizon.