UniMap allows customers to have unified maps that are refreshed in seconds
LAS VEGAS—Saying that it enables rapid creation of digital maps and location products, HERE Technologies launched UniMap this week here at CES. UniMap provides up-to-date and unified map content for automated driving, logistics and enterprise markets, the company said.
While mapping updates used to take months, UniMap allows customers to have unified maps that are refreshed in seconds, said Giovanni Lanfranchi, HERE’s senior vice president and chief product & technology officer.
“This a transformation we started three years ago. We said, let’s really unify all the pipelines we have into one single end-to-end automated pipeline,” he said. “From there, we can feed use cases from classic car navigation, search places, Level 2-3 autonomous driving and navigation on demand.”
HERE has been developing the technology with such automotive companies as BMW Group. UniMap is set for a rollout to select customers this year before being available to all company customers in 2024.
UniMap uses AI models to automate 500 million kilometers of vehicle probe and sensor data every hour, extract map features such as 2D and 3D positioning of road signs, validate speed limits and to build missing road geometry, the company said.
“We are able to produce an entire continent’s [map data] in 24 hours. The value we are providing is [map] freshness—it keeps latency very low,” Lanfranchi said. “No one in the industry has this.”
HERE also released Automated Driving Zones at CES, which is cloud-based software that automakers can use to decide where, when and under what operating conditions is it safe to activate automated driving capabilities on their cars. To keep cars safe, automakers need to have a defined Operational Design Domain, or ODD, that characterizes the operating conditions—something that the HERE software can define, the company said.
In other HERE CES announcements:
- The company launched a new service that predicts the likelihood of an electric vehicle (EV) public charge point being available in the future. The services incorporates both EV infrastructure supply and real-world user demand, while factoring in variables such as weather, time and day.
- HERE Road Alerts allow drivers to have accurate and timely information about hazards on the road ahead to make better and safer driving decisions.
- HERE Location Services features an on-premise service offering that allows customers and partners in healthcare, tech, and more to install and run company software directly on their servers or cloud environment.
- HERE’s platform now gives companies the power to use their own places of interest data to customize search results on top of HERE Map Content for B2C brands.
