Analog Devices (ADI) has partnered with Chinese autonomous driving technology company, Momenta, to develop high-definition (HD) maps for autonomous vehicles. HD maps are a critical element of autonomous driving and must deliver accurate, real-time information to help safely guide the vehicle to its destination. As part of the collaboration, Analog Devices’ inertial measurement units (IMUs) will be used to improve the mapping system setup and technology upgrades in Momenta’s L3 freeway ramp-to-ramp solution and L4 full autonomy driving solutions.
Under poor weather conditions, or when the GPS signal is lost, an IMU becomes essential in delivering high-precision mapping output. ADI’s IMUs will be used to enhance Momenta’s mapping solutions to more effectively meet the demanding accuracy requirements of HD maps. The IMUs exceed the value/performance ratio of higher cost alternative sensors based on fiber optic gyro or laser gyro technologies.
In creating HD maps, crowd-sourcing has become a mainstream development tool due to its low cost and timely updating features. This is particularly important, for example, in Asia where infrastructure updates are frequent. Momenta’s vision-based semantic HD maps are crowd-sourced, highly accurate and frequently updated. They have the capability to provide map update and localization services. Momenta is also able to leverage modules mounted on taxis, trucks and buses at a large scale to create a crowd-sourcing map for building the “brains” of autonomous vehicles.
Momenta’s team is comprised of some of the world’s foremost experts on computer vision and deep learning, including one of the authors of Faster R-CNN and ResNet, the most influential deep learning network, and winners of various top Computer Vision Competitions (ImageNet 2015, MS COCO Challenge 2015, ImageNet 2017, etc.). Group members mainly come from top universities and well-known technology companies. Momenta is a leader in the autonomous driving software space with advanced technical competence and a strong commitment to innovation.
Analog Devices has more than 30 years of experience in MEMS inertial sensor design. ADI’s MEMS IMUs have been successfully applied in the avionics and smart agriculture sectors in which requirements are like those for autonomous driving. They are comprehensively verified by market and capable of maintaining critical specifications such as bias, sensitivity, and cross-axis sensitivity under all conditions, including time variation, shock, vibration, and temperature conditions.
