Through the acquisition of the U.S. high-tech mapping company Carmera Inc., Toyota Motor Corp. expects to get a boost in its pursuit of higher-level autonomous capabilities in the next several years. Automated driving technology is currently offered only in the Lexus LS luxury sedan and the pricey Toyota Mirai fuel cell vehicle.
Toyota’s in-house automated-driving subsidiary Woven Planet and Carmera have been working on projects together since 2018. Those collaborations laid the groundwork for the acquisition. Carmera’s technology melds existing inexpensive camera technologies to automatically record and upload changes to the highways and byways as vehicles drive by.
The key is to create an affordable redundancy that reinforces vehicle safety. “We blend them together for a kind of safety envelope that doesn’t give an overreliance on one sensor that could be a critical point of failure which could endanger the passenger,” Mandali Khalesi, Woven Planet’s vice president of automated driving strategy and mapping said. “With Carmera joining the team, we’ll be able to hit the accelerator.”
Read the article at The Car Gossip.
