Ford Invests in Civil Maps, 3-D Mapping Startup Focusing on Fully Autonomous Cars

Jennifer van der Kleut

Ford Motor Company has joined a $6.6-million funding round for a startup company working on 3-D mapping.

The company, Civil Maps, “uses spatial data to create ‘extremely accurate localization,’ explains ZDNet. Civil Maps “claims its technology is better suited to autonomous vehicles and mobile networks than existing mapping technologies.”

Civil Maps is focusing solely on fully autonomous cars, rather than on semi-autonomous systems like Tesla Motors’.

Capable mapping is a key component to the success and efficiency of fully self-driving cars. As Fortune Magazine explains, it’s not only a matter of being able to see the world around the car, but also being able to fully comprehend what is around the car, and whether it is important. In other words, being able to discern a pedestrian from a street sign, or a leaf on the road versus a big piece of wood (which is what caused the latest in a string of crashes with Tesla’s Autopilot system).

“Civil Maps boasts it has developed technology to address one of the stickier mapping issues with self-driving cars: converting the massive amounts of data coming in from the car’s sensors into valuable and readable maps,” Fortune explains.

“Autonomous vehicles require a totally new kind of map,” Sravan Puttagunta, CEO of Civil Maps, told ZDNet. “Civil Maps’ scalable map generation process enables fully autonomous vehicles to drive like humans do - identifying on-road and off-road features even when they might be missing, deteriorated or hidden from view, and letting a car know what it can expect along its route.”

Ford, which has long been working on developing and testing its own brand of self-driving cars, recently joined a round of funding for Civil Maps led by Motus Ventures, which was also joined by Wicklow Capital, StartX Stanford, and Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures.

Ford also joined Google, Uber, Lyft, and Volvo earlier this year to create the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets group, which aims to promote the concept of self-driving cars and influence legislation, ZDNet reported.

Civil Maps’ existing investors include Chinese auto-maker SAIC Motor Co and Stanford-StartX Fund.

Investing in and acquiring 3-D mapping technology is becoming a strong focus for companies working on driverless technology. Last summer, German automakers such as Audi, BMW and Daimler announced they were teaming up to pay more than $2.7 billion for Nokia’s Here.

Image courtesy of Civil Maps.