Ford pumps up Velodyne; will double Silicon Valley team in a year

Automotive giant Ford has pledged to double the size of its Silicon Valley team by the end of 2017 and also invested $75 million into Velodyne, which sells LiDAR (light imaging, detection, and ranging) sensors for cars.

The dual announcements show an increase in commitment to technology inside cars, especially autonomous tech. Ford is behind the curve compared to Tesla, Google, and rival General Motors, which has acquired its own autonomous startup, partnered with Lyft, and plans to build a huge tech center.

Ford’s Silicon Valley operations currently employ 130 engineers and scientists, this will rise to 260 by the end of 2017. It will expand the campus from 30,000 to 180,000 square feet.

“We will have one of the largest automotive presences in Silicon Valley by the end of the year,” said Ford CEO Mark Fields. “We really want to be part of the community. We view ourselves both as an automotive company and a mobility company.”

Mobility is a buzzword that a lot of automotive firms have been using the past year. It suggests that automotive firms, like Silicon Valley, think autonomous cars will reduce car ownership and increase taxi services.

Ford: Self-driving tech is this century’s “assembly line”

Fields expects autonomy to be a major deal, he said to CNBC’s Squawk Box: “Autonomous vehicles could have just have as significant of an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did 100 years ago.”

The other announcement is a little less exciting, Velodyne and Ford have been partners for some time. Ford’s $75 million investment signals that Velodyne will be a key supplier of LiDAR for its self-driving car. Search engine Baidu, which is building its own self-driving system, also invested in the company.

It is not Ford’s first Silicon Valley investment either, in May it invested $182 million in Pivotal, a software development firm that worked on FordPass.

That said, it still hasn’t completed a major acquisition for a tech startup. That might be necessary for Ford to get a lead in the autonomous car race, or it could partner with Google, which was rumored in 2015.

Ford’s autonomous vehicle work opens wallet for Civil Maps

Ford recently announced it invested alongside others in a $6.6 million round for California startup Civil Maps, a firm that is using AI-driven smart mapping software for self-driving cars.

Ford executives know that self-driving cars are going to happen — they have over 100 experts trying to perfect the self-driving car — and they want in on this lucrative venture.

The round was led by Motus Ventures and, aside from Ford, investors include Wicklow Capital, StartX Stanford and Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures.

“Autonomous vehicles require a totally new kind of map,” said Sravan Puttagunta, Chief Executive Officer, Civil Maps. “Civil Maps’ scalable map generation process enables fully autonomous vehicles to drive like humans do – identifying on-road and off-road features even when they might be missing, deteriorated or hidden from view and letting a car know what it can expect along its route. We are honored to work with Ford and the rest of our investor team to pave the way for fully autonomous vehicles at continental scale.”

Ford has been road testing its technology, with technicians looking at the sensors and other aspects of autonomous vehicles.  By teaming up with Civil Maps, Ford can take the next step into designing a reliable self-driving vehicle.

Civil Maps building a mapping backbone

“Civil Maps’ pioneering mapping technology is building the backbone of our fully autonomous future,” said Jim DiSanto, managing director of Motus Ventures.

“By creating and managing live semantic maps of all the roads in America, the company is providing a technology essential for the leap to fully autonomous vehicles that can transform the future of transportation.”

Civil Maps has created the software that will allow for raw 3D data to be processed from LiDAR, which is a high-resolution laser imaging device. Sensors and cameras will be incorporated in these autonomous vehicles as well.

By creating special maps, Civil Maps makes it possible for self-driving vehicles to be their own drivers.  Features on and off the highway can be detected, making a trip easy

With the aid of this technology, the possibility of accidents in greatly diminished, to a near zero chance, reducing stress on drivers.  This makes perfecting autonomous vehicles one of the biggest goals of big companies like Ford.

Will lasers allow driverless cars to run dark?

Self-driving cars use a number of different technologies to “see” the world around them. One of them is LIDAR, and some believe it could be the solution to the ever-present problem of light pollution that is plaguing cities.

Unfortunately, the idea of driving with your headlights off and using laser-guidance as your primary and potentially sole method of identifying obstacles is hazardous.

If you haven’t heard the term LIDAR before, you will likely hear all about it in the next few years. Basically, it stands for Light Detection and Ranging, and it’s the technology that enables self-driving cars to spot and track obstacles, roadways, and other critical data that keeps them from crashing.

See also: China moves into passing lane with self-driving regulations

It is one of three systems that autonomous vehicles use to do their thing, and all three of them are necessary to maintain an optimal level of safety.

Cameras are another, and those require light to function optimally. These do a number of things, including helping the car to see and identify moving objects, such as people and animals in the roadway.

The third is radar, which helps the car to be aware of vehicles both in front and behind it and is commonly seen in cars with adaptive cruise control.

In a recent interview with Inverse, Michael Clamann, a senior research scientist at Duke University, said: “The whole point of having multiple systems on these cars is that they have redundancy. There are certain things that LIDAR is good at, there are certain things that cameras are good at, and there are certain things that radar is good at.”

Will lasers set driverless cars on “kill”?

If we were to take two of those systems out of the equation, you’re left with a vehicle that, while it might be able to navigate and handle basic obstacle avoidance, would leave it inherently less safe.

Autonomous vehicles have a hard enough time as it is trying to predict the movements of obstacles. A deer, for example, is by its very nature unpredictable. Having headlights on gives passengers and “drivers” an opportunity to act when the vehicle is unable to accurately predict what is going to happen.

Additionally, LIDAR itself isn’t perfect. It doesn’t work very well in heavy rain or snow. It needs a clear point-to-point path to objects around it to properly identify their distance, size, and shape.

So, will self-driving cars help us to cut down on the amount of light pollution in our cities? Possibly, but not with the technologies currently available. Until a new generation of sensors and cameras are created, bright headlights will remain a familiar sight on our roadways.