Self-Driving Cars Gain 'Sight' With Civil Maps

(TNS) -- If self-driving cars are really the future of transportation, they need to mimic humans’ basic mental skills: knowing to stop at a stop sign, or turn left in a left-only lane.

“We need to create a car that has the (same) cognitive ability as the most expert human driver,” said Sravan Puttagunta, CEO of Civil Maps, an artificial intelligence startup.

Puttagunta wants to build the brains behind self-driving cars. The idea is to make autonomous vehicles as comfortable as humans in a familiar neighborhood. To do this, the technology constantly scans and catalogs streets and highways, and instantly updates its cloud memory bank with that information.

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Civil Maps garnered extra attention this week because of a video circulating online that shows exactly how its technology “sees” the road. Puttagunta said the company is also talking with dozens of automakers, but declined to specify which ones. He said his company has partners in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

The San Francisco company currently has $11 million in funding. Ford participated in a $6.6 million round last year, along with Motus Ventures, which led the deal, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures.

The Detroit automaker, which recently replaced its CEO with the leader of its advanced-technology group, has said it wants to put autonomous vehicles that can be hailed with an app on the road by 2021.

Civil Maps is just one of many startups that have forged alliances with big automakers in the field of self-driving cars. Even though self-driving cars are still a ways off, there are dozens of companies in the Bay Area alone looking to capitalize on a future where cars drive themselves.

“We want to be the company that brings clarity to the space,” he said.

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