Germany: Following the success of months-long discussions with the international automotive and mapping companies in Europe, the U.S. and Asia, location cloud company, HERE has submitted a universal data format called SENSORIS to ERTICO – ITS Europe. It is a European public/private partnership for intelligent transport systems, which has agreed to continue as an Innovation Platform to evolve a standardized interface specification for broadly using across the automotive industry.
To date, 11 major automotive and supplier companies have already joined the SENSORIS Innovation Platform now under the coordination of ERTICO. SENSORIS was initiated by HERE in June 2015 when the company published the first open specification for how vehicle sensor data gathered by connected cars could be sent to the cloud for processing and analysis. Currently, vehicle sensor data exists in multiple different formats across automakers.
HERE believes that pooling analogous vehicle data from millions of vehicles will be a key enabler for highly and fully automated driving, ensuring that each vehicle has a near real-time view of road conditions and hazards that can lead to better driving decisions. HERE is developing the required location cloud technology that can detect and process changes in the real world as they happen – including on roads in dozens of countries – on an industrial scale and at high quality.
“Our goal was always to find a home for this specification that is open, accessible to all and global. This is a vital step along the path to creating a shared information network for safer roads,” said Dietmar Rabel, head of autonomous driving product management at HERE. “If a car around the next corner hits the brakes because there’s an obstruction, that information could be used to signal to the drivers behind to slow down ahead of time, resulting in smoother, more efficient journeys and a lower risk of accidents. But that can only work if all cars can speak and understand the same language.”
ERTICO – ITS Europe is a body which has a long track record of successfully overseeing the development of globally-adopted standards relating to future automotive and transportation technologies. This includes in particular ADASIS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Interface Specifications), a forum that defines how maps connect and interact with the advanced driver assistance systems of a car.
