April 12, 2018

Here Technologies opens R&D facility in Boulder

BOULDER — Here Technologies, a global provider of mapping for autonomous vehicles, has opened a research and development facility in Boulder.

The new location at 4900 Pearl East Circle has about 20 employees with plans to grow to about 35 in the next year. It will focus on geospatial engineering and crowdsourcing data from car sensors to be used for high-definition mapping.

HERE Technologies deploys vehicles equipped with GPS, LiDAR and multiple cameras, as seen on the apparatus here. BizWest/Jensen Werley.

Here is based in Amsterdam but has 137 locations in 50 countries, including its largest U.S. office in Chicago. The company is backed by Audi, Daimler and BMW — three German car companies that entered a partnership to purchase Here — as well as Bosch, Intel, Continental and Pioneer.

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The company’s goal has been to make high-definition maps necessary to make vehicles fully autonomous. For autonomous vehicles to work, they not only have to sense their surroundings and make a decision, but they have to have precise data with wiggle room of less than 20 centimeters.

“To be five meters off would be significant for high-definition mapping,” said Sanjay Sood, vice president of highly automated driving for Here. He added that if a GPS told a driver to turn right in 100 feet when the turn was really in 110 feet, it might not matter. But to be off that much when a vehicle is operating autonomously could mean the vehicle hits an object.

To counteract the potential of being off, Here is creating high-definition maps of roadways. The maps are built in three layers, with the first being a model of the road, the second being a 3-D rendering of the road complete with correct slope, color and measurements curb-to-curb and the top layer including all of the signage and markings on that roadway.

But to build a map in high definition requires significant data collection. Here has vehicles equipped with a $100,000 image capturing system complete with LiDAR, four cameras and GPS. The vehicles are deployed throughout the world driving and collecting data. The issue is, although the maps are done accurately, it’s difficult to scale up when expensive equipment is required and it’s difficult to keep it constantly updated. Another solution is to crowdsource the data, collecting it from various sources including cell phones, vehicles with built in cameras and other roadway sensors. The issue with relying on crowdsourcing is that the data collected can be less accurate.

Here’s solution is to bring the two, industrial capture and crowdsourcing, together. Data is initially collected using industrial capture and then constantly updated using crowdsourcing.

It’s the latter that will be the focus of the Boulder office, which is working with tech companies, original equipment manufacturers and other potential data sources to update the qualities of the maps and how vehicles perceive them.

The company selected Boulder because of the quality of talent it has specifically in the geospatial engineering field.

“I’ve worked in Boulder’s geospatial tech space for 20 years,” said Carolyn Johnston, principal engineer for Here Boulder. She cited the presence of companies like DigitalGlobe and Mapquest.

“Boulder has been a hotbed for geospatial tech. There are few places in the country where we’re looking for core talent and can find people already trained up,” she said. “But here there are traditionally underserved geospatial engineers that have been looking for something chewy to get into.”

The work will include challenges for the engineers, such as how to sort through the different qualities of data the company will receive through crowdsourcing and give each data set the proper weight it deserves in building out the maps. Another challenge, Johnston said, will be in making sense of what is seen in captured images, down to what each sign says and being correct in the interpretation.

The company plans to continue to grow its Boulder office, which will become the headquarters for crowdsourcing data. Prior to opening the new location, the company had a smaller presence in the city for the last year-and-a-half as it built up to opening its new location.

In the next year, the company expects cars to be on the road that will be using its data. To use the high definition maps, vehicles must have more sophisticated computing systems, Sood said.  They also require more storage, to cache the map of the city they are driving in. And they require connectivity to the internet so they can continuously be updated.

The company also plans to continuously update its maps with new road data, said Ralf Herrtwich, senior vice president of automotive for Here.

“The map is never complete,” he said.

 

BOULDER — Here Technologies, a global provider of mapping for autonomous vehicles, has opened a research and development facility in Boulder.

The new location at 4900 Pearl East Circle has about 20 employees with plans to grow to about 35 in the next year. It will focus on geospatial engineering and crowdsourcing data from car sensors to be used for high-definition mapping.

HERE Technologies deploys vehicles equipped with GPS, LiDAR and multiple cameras, as seen on the apparatus here. BizWest/Jensen Werley.

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