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Although autonomous vehicle testing is occurring around the world, New York City isn’t generally considered a hotbed for the technology. The biggest city in the U.S. and second biggest in North America could still play a key role in the development of self-driving cars, thanks in part to tests in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. CARMERA Inc., which creates “living” maps for autonomous vehicles, is a participant in those trials and is working with researchers and government agencies toward the goal of safe and reliable deployments. The CARMERA Autonomous Map provides high-definition (HD) maps and navigation data to autonomous vehicles (AVs) in real time. The company uses data collected by sensors in partner vehicles. It says its “proprietary data pipelines conform to any customer-specific implementation of localization, verification, path planning, and simulation, allowing AVs to know where they are, confirm what they’re seeing, and know where to go next.” Last year, CARMERA raised Series B funding of $20 million from GV, formerly Google Ventures. The company also won the Best in Show and Startup of the Year awards at the 2018 North American International Auto Show. The Robot Report spoke with Ro Gupta, CEO of CARMERA , about the importance of mapping to AVs and what the startup has learned in New York. A key part of the AV stack “If you think about the three or four core parts of any autonomous vehicle or robotics stack, they include localization, perception, planning, and control or actuation,” explained Gupta. “With the exception of Tesla , everyone in the industry is using maps to get to redundancy for the first three of these questions: ‘Where am I?’ ‘What’s around me?’ ‘What’s next?’ and ‘How do I do it?’” “Years ago, maps were used for only one or two of these questions, but […]