05-05-2025
AI Is Changing the Way Mapmakers Digitize Our World for Automation
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Sixty-five to seventy percent of the automotive market is served by a company few outside the industry have heard of, but one that makes a monumental impact on drivers' daily journeys. For 40 years, Here Technologies has been digitizing maps. Over that time, mapping technology has moved from navigation to a necessary tool in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).
"We invented digital map making, and we [have] continuously perfected [that process] over those 40 years. As you can imagine, that has changed a lot. In the past, people were simply digitizing physical maps, and now we are leveraging tens of millions of connected vehicles worth of sensor data that we transform into a digital map," Remco Timmer, senior vice president of product management at Here Technologies told Newsweek.
While mapping for in-car navigation systems is still a large part of the company's business, in recent years, the market has diversified as new technology has come into demand. "Globally, we're, by far, number one serving the map for the navigation use case in vehicles, not only passenger vehicles, also commercial vehicles, and fleet operators. Big companies out there, big transport and logistics companies, are leveraging our map to plan logistics operations and to keep track of vehicles and goods that are on the road," Timmer said.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping Here Technologies stay at the forefront of mapping innovation. "If you're a digital company, you need to continuously reinvent yourself, otherwise you become obsolete very fast. So, we continuously reinvent ourselves," he said.
A handout image from Here Technologies showing a rendering of advanced driver safety system obstacle detection.
A handout image from Here Technologies showing a rendering of advanced driver safety system obstacle detection.
Here Technologies
The era of software-defined vehicles, which the automotive industry is starting to enter, is creating new opportunities for the company. Before, automakers would purchase technology and skin it with their own graphics and branded identity. Now, integration is deeper.
Timmer said: "The software becomes a critical part of how to manifest the brand and the brand experience, and the software is really the thing that provides the convenience for the users. As a consequence, we see that original equipment manufacturers are purchasing differently, and they are looking for very, very reliable, pre-integrated software stacks. But, also stacks that can still be adjusted and customized and configured in such a way that they can differentiate from the competition."
Having Here's technology integrated in a software stack allows it to be updated remotely, over the air, just as many of the software and hardware components of a vehicle are made more modern. This is a significant departure from the way updating mapping information used to occur.
There have been three generations of modern mapping technology, Timmer said. The Download Era featured digital maps that were printed on physical mediums like CDs and hard drives. It could take years to get a map in a car from the time it was made. Car owners would have to be notified of an update and take their car to a dealership to have it installed.
About a decade ago, Here Technologies started offering maps that could be streamed online. Most vehicles on the road are equipped with this era of technology. Those maps are typically updated weekly. "We have over 800 attributes in our map, so not everything is updated at the same frequency, but pretty much every week, there's a fresh map at that platform endpoint," Timmer said.
In the immediate future is the Live Map Era. This era allows the application program interface (API) to respond in real time to signals sent to it from vehicles that indicate that a map may be inaccurate. Timmer calls this "noise."
He said: "It's a lot of noise that we get back. And then we need to find the signal in that noise to say, 'Indeed, the map might be off.' And then we run a campaign to acquire the data that we then use to update the map accordingly. We're basically increasing the speed of this feedback loop and increasing the speed of the map adoption [in this era]."
New vehicles have sensor stacks that can enhance users' mapping experiences. They can detect new signs, road regulations and streets. All the gathered data is anonymized and needs to be verified. Here Technologies employs a team that references multiple sources of information before changing a map, including aerial photography, satellite images and sensor data. They also work with local governments to better understand and convey local rules and sign conventions.
"There's new data around the old data [that is] still super relevant, and the old ways of making my app are still very relevant," Timmer said. But artificial intelligence is leading the way into the future, and it has been for 20 years.
"For us, that was the most normal thing. For the last 20 years we were leveraging AI throughout the way we make a map. There wouldn't be any other way to keep the map of the world up to date. If you would want to have humans encode the entire world, it would be way too slow," he said.
What native navigation systems, like what Here Technologies sells to automakers, lack is real time incident and obstacle reporting, something that apps like Waze inherently have. It's something Timmer admits is frustrating.
A hand holding a smartphone featuring the Here WeGo app for fleet teams.
A hand holding a smartphone featuring the Here WeGo app for fleet teams.
Here Technologies
The new era of mapping will ideally lead to "an equally or much better native navigation experience into a vehicle, because it can actually leverage a lot of vehicle sensing data along the way. It would be much more powerful. It would be aware of the vehicle state," Timmer said. "These products take a while to enter into the vehicles of today, and I think the innovation cycle of original equipment manufacturers was typically taking so long that it would take four or five, up to seven years for this kind of technology to enter the market."
Today, new vehicle innovation cycles are shortening thanks to competition from Chinese manufacturers and the adoption of AI in the design studio, technology labs and crash testing facilities. And, ADAS technology is rapidly improving. Quickly updated navigation data aids the development of those technologies, helping instill confidence in a more autonomized driving future.
Here has a 10-year infrastructure agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support its AI-powered, livestreaming map and location services. Backed by that infrastructure, the company has developed two products to further its portfolio. Here SceneXtract is a tool that combines AI models, natural language processing and high-definition 3D map data to create simulated real-world driving scenes to test ADAS and automated driving technologies. Here AI Assistant is designed to transform personalized travel planning by introducing a proprietary, generative AI vehicle guidance assistant that can respond to complex queries from natural language props.
