Mercedes demoes a self-driving car in partnership with HERE

Mercedes S500 connected car
By Harish Jonnalagadda on 15 May 2014 07:39 am

Mercedes is developing a self-driving car in collaboration with Nokia's HERE mapping division. The carmaker demoed the technology on an S500 equipped with radar sensors and stereoscopic cameras that give the car a 360 degree view of its surroundings. These sensors are coupled with markers which can identify other cars, pedestrians and any incoming obstacles.

The sensors extrapolate the information to HERE's 3D maps, which help in determining the position of the car on a multi-lane highway down to 20 cm. HERE is working on a connected service that alerts self-driving cars to slippery conditions as well as the ability to see around corners at an intersection.

This isn't the first time Mercedes and HERE collaborated. Last September, Mercedes in conjunction with HERE proved that self-driving cars can effectively navigate in an urban as well as a rural environment by conducting a 100 km test. While the technology is still in its nascent stages, Mercedes believes that it can have a fully autonomous vehicle on the market by 2020.

Ogi Redzic, VP of Connected Driving at HERE, mentioned that autonomous vehicles will radically transform how we live and work.

The technology we developed with Mercedes-Benz allowed us to provide the foundation for automated driving. We took next-generation mapping to its full potential. We collected, processed and published all the data to build an entire new virtual reality of the route the S 500 took.

Using our data, in addition to the sensor data, the car could decide an appropriate speed for the road, know which lane it should aim to be in, what was coming up, and everything else it needed to know to complete the 100km journey.

Source: HERE

Harish Jonnalagadda Harish Jonnalagadda "Newsroom Warrior for Mobile Nations" 114 (articles) 0 (forum posts)

Reader comments

Mercedes demoes a self-driving car in partnership with HERE


Great, this is the future. But it's still a long way to go. The driver is holding his hands so close to the steering wheels as if he don't trusts the technology and needs to interact any second ... ;)

The only way this tech makes the roads a safer place is if everyone is using it. If only a few people have this then I makes you no more safe.

It's still a really cool idea! This sort of stuff is the future and it takes someone making it a solid products and then getting it into the hands of the people.

This made me realize self driving cars will be another platform battle. You'll have cars with Google based systems, Nokia based systems, and who knows what other platform. Will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Imagine how much more sleep we can get too. ;)
This is pretty great, and I'm glad there are other companies besides google spanning out to automatically driven cars. Auto cars? Auto Autos? Haha.
One thing that comes in to play is car accidents - if the automated car got into an accident, who's fault is it? No one will be ticketed? how will insurance companies deal with such things?

This is really cool stuff! I agree that self-driving cars might lead, initially, to a platform war, but you've gotta think that universal standards are going to be necessary, at least by region, if (and when) self-driving cars become more of a mainstream reality. All vehicles on the road will have to have a common language to talk to one another, unless they're all completely autonomous, I guess.