German automaker Volkswagen has teamed up with Mobileye, an Israeli technology company that develops vision-based driver assistance systems, to map self-driving vehicles.

The two companies have signed an agreement to ‘implement a new navigation standard for autonomous driving’ in 2018. This agreement will see future Volkswagen models using Mobileye’s camera-based map and localisation technology Road Experience Management (REM). Using crowdsourcing, Mobileye’s technology will generate real-time data for ‘precise localisation and acquisition of high-definition track data’.

The Volkswagen cars with the REM technology will be equipped with front cameras, which acquire lane marking and road information via optical sensor systems. This information then makes its way into a cloud and is, in turn, used to improve navigation maps.

“The future of autonomous driving depends on the ability to create and maintain precise high-definition maps and scale them at minimal cost”, said Professor Amnon Shashua, co-founder and CTO of Mobileye. “The Volkswagen agreement is a turning point. It not only utilises crowd-sourcing technology to automatically generate high-definition maps and scale them cost-effectively. A much more important aspect is that the agreement provides a framework for industry-wide cooperation between automobile manufacturers to jointly produce the map contents that are needed for autonomous driving.”