Autonomous cars are getting good at the open road. But drive one into an indoor parking garage and the picture changes. GPS falls away, layouts differ per floor, and the map simply stops at the entrance. HERE Technologies, the world's largest mapmaker, wanted to extend the map indoors: give parking facilities and autonomous vehicles a shared language, so a car can find a spot without a human taking over.
We combined video and LiDAR to map indoor areas, and built computer-vision algorithms that recognise parking spots and their occupancy from that data. That intelligence feeds V2X communication (vehicle-to-infrastructure) between the garage and the car: the facility knows what's free, the vehicle knows where to go, and the two keep each other up to date while the car navigates the structure independently.
A working chain from sensor to decision: garages mapped with video and LiDAR, parking spots identified by computer vision, and autonomous vehicles navigating indoor structures on their own. For HERE, it's a concrete step in bringing the map to places satellites can't see.
