The billion dollar war over maps
During a test drive near Ford's Michigan headquarters, the team noticed something strange with its self-driving cars.
Each car shifted slightly at the same point in the lane "as if they were avoiding a pothole," says Jim McBride, Ford's senior technical leader for autonomous cars.
The problem wasn't the cars -- it was the map.
The team had just updated its 3D map of the test route, which helps guide self-driving cars. But a minor glitch caused one pixel on the map to have the wrong data value. It told the car a spot in the ground was raised 10 inches, when it was perfectly level.
"The new map looked perfect to the human eye," McBride says. But not to the eye of a self-driving car. "A single incorrect pixel," he says, was enough to throw off the cars.
Read more: http://www.wctrib.com/news/4279608-billion-dollar-war-over-maps
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