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| Standard off-board mapping.
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10/1/05 |
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An ISO standard for electronic mapping has come a step closer with the publication of the results of an EC-funded project on the subject. The final report of the ActMAP project due to be made public in January, will form the basis of a submission for an ISO standard and is expected to lead to enhanced navigation and ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) applications becoming available.
The 32 month project, which began work in April 2002, had the objective of developing the architecture and standardised interfaces which could be made immediately available to in-vehicle systems and nomad devices for safety purposes. By contrast, the commercial off-board mapping applications that have been on the market since the early part of this decade, have tended to concentrate on navigational, rather than driver safety, issues.
"ActMAP has been firmly focussed on in-vehicle navigation and PDA applications as well as ADAS," said Edwin Bastiaensen, the Project Co-ordinator. "It has always been recognised that in-vehicle maps needed to be very accurate if they were to have a role in improving driver safety. What we have done is to develop a standardised solution, a mechanism for providing incremental updates to in-vehicle map databases through a common framework for wireless communications."
Managed by ERTICO, the DG (Infso) sponsored consortium of BMW, DaimlerChrysler, CRF, Siemens VDO, Navteq, TeleAtlas and Navigon demonstrated a number of applications at their forum meeting in October in Germany. Amongst these was DaimlerChrysler's routing with updated points of interest, and Navigon's PDA navigation application. In terms of ADAS, BMW demonstrated the X5 with speed assistant application. The different test implementations realised by the ActMAP partners have shown the technical feasibility of a complete system for the distribution of map updates.
"The amount of updates created by the map suppliers during the ActMAP tests and validation was surprisingly high," said Bastieensen. "Solutions have been proposed to prioritise critical map updates as compared to other "normalization" updates due, for example, to new naming conventions. This results in more efficient use of the limited capacity of the communication link and its related cost for the end-users. In this perspective, filtering was found to be one of the most difficult challenges for an ActMAP system."
But several issues continue to stand in the way of real-time updating including the limited bandwidth of the transmission channels, at least until the arrival of UMTS technology, the timing constraints of the dynamic updates and the quality of the distributed information. As far as this last point is concerned, information relating to changes in the database clearly have to be checked and verified prior to publication and this is bound to take time.
"It is important," said Bastiaensen, "to avoid liability issues arising out of inaccurate maps for safety applications. Related to this, the MAPS&ADAS subproject in the IP PReVENT will look into ways of certifying safety map data."
Given the current attitude of sections of the US Administration towards standards, it will be interesting to see the response of the ISO towards this latest application.
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Further information, contact:
Edwin Bastiaensen, ActMAP Project Co-ordinator, ERTICO ITS Europe. Tel #32 2 400 07 31, E-mail e.bastiaensen@mail.ertico.com or Maxime Flament, tel. +32-2-400 735 m.flament@mail.ertico.com
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