Signal 2: Autonomous Vehicle Mapping

Context: As more and more of society’s attention and resources turn to making autonomous vehicles first feasible and then commonplace, a marketplace of auxiliary services is cropping up. One important player in the field is Carmera, a computer-vision company working to build a suite of tools around serving fleets of autonomous vehicles.

Complication: I feel ambivalent about the future of AVs — primarily because if we allow them just to replace human-driven cars then we’ve done nothing about what Jarrett Walker calls the basic geometry of city streets. Individual cars will never serve to alleviate transit, only groupings of people into larger vehicles can do that.

Resolution: However, one of the promises of AVs is the greater efficiency and rationality they offer over a flawed human’s piloting. Carmera’s mapping services use the video feed from the cars on which their devices are mounted to build out a streaming, distributed map of the city that enables their cars to account for and react to events as they happen in real-time.

Next Steps: The company’s video feeds could also serve as a valuable urban science research dataset — empowering scientists to study various street and pedestrian conditions at immense scale.