Ford is among the tech companies investing in self-driving car technology through 3D-mapping startup Civil Maps. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang's AME Cloud Ventures was among other participants in the $6.6 million investment round. Civil Maps uses artificial intelligence (AI) to convert data from a robot car's sensors into map information to be used in autonomous vehicles (AV).
Other companies investing in Civil Maps include Wicklow Capital and StartX Stanford, while it had already raised nearly $3 million before the latest investment round, according to VentureBeat. The California company was founded in 2014.
Civil Maps shared that the latest fundraising event will be used to speed up product development and launch self-driving tech in the auto and tech industries.
The company plans to design robotic smart cars with AI that ends the need to use detailed 3D maps of public roads. It will instead build real-time maps.
Maps will have a key function in the development of self-driving cars. This could explain why Google is the leader in AV research and development. It uses its in-house mapping platform Google Maps, which is partly why last year a group of auto giants purchased Here Maps from Nokia for $3 billion.
However Civil Maps CEO Sravan Puttagunta shared that AVs required a new type of maps. Civil Maps' map-building process allows fully autonomous cars to detect on/off road features so they know what is down the road.
Several companies in the auto industry's AV sector have been making profuse investments recently. Earlier this year General Motors (GM) bought autonomous car startup Cruise Automation for more than $1 billion. Meanwhile, BMW will team up with chipmaker Intel and machine vision company Mobileye to manufacture fully-autonomous cars within half a decade.
Toyota will also launch a research lab to develop AVs and home robots. It will be headed by Google's former head of robotics.
In related news, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has launched an investigation of self-driving car tech, according to USA Today. It follows the first fatal crash of a Tesla car in Autopilot mode.
The NTSB's probe follows one launched by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). NTSB's car crash investigations usually center on new technologies.
If the federal agency rules that Tesla's Autopilot system is not ready for public roads it could slow down the development of driverless car tech.
Here's a video on Ford's self-driving car: