If international car companies want to promote self-driving cars in China, then high-precision positioning services will almost always use Beidou, and high-precision maps will all rely on Chinese related map dealers. For example, BMW established cooperation with NavInfo, which will provide high-precision map services required by BMW for self-driving cars.
Recently, Toyota has also reached strategic cooperation with Chinese self-driving startup Momenta, which will provide high-resolution maps and update services based on camera vision technology. The two parties will jointly promote the commercial implementation of Toyota’s Automated Mapping Platform (AMP) in China to better serve Chinese users.
Momenta is positioned to create the “brain” of autonomous driving, and its core technologies are environment learning based on deep learning, high-precision maps and driving decision algorithms. At the same time, Momenta also has Class A qualification for electronic navigation maps, which can carry out data collection and production of high-precision maps.
In addition to establishing cooperation with Momenta, Toyota itself is also developing high-definition maps. Just a few days ago, Toyota Advanced Research Institute (TRI-AD), a Toyota autonomous driving software research and development company, showed a high-precision map with a relative accuracy of less than 50cm. It has no obvious advantage in terms of accuracy alone. It is reported that TRI-AD has been building high-precision maps since last year, and has now created maps of 23 Tokyo districts and 6 cities around the world.
In terms of autonomous driving research and development, Toyota has been using Lexus LS 500h-based modified cars for related tests. According to Toyota’s plan, Lexus cars with autonomous driving will be launched later in 2020. In addition, Toyota also introduced the e-Palette, a fully electric fully-autonomous driving concept car, which has obvious advantages such as modularity and scalability, and is an ideal solution for mobile travel services.
