DETROIT- TU-Automotive Detroit – TomTom (TOM2) and Bosch today announced the creation of an HD map with integrated Radar Road Signature layer for the localisation of vehicles in autonomous driving. The Radar Road Signature layer will allow automated vehicles to determine their exact location on a road down to a few centimeters, working in conjunction with the TomTom HD Map.

The advantage of the Bosch Radar Road Signature map is its robustness: unlike maps that rely exclusively on video data for vehicle localisation, the Radar Road Signature can be used and generated reliably at night and in conditions of poor visibility. The Bosch Radar Road Signature only needs to transmit five kilobytes of data to a cloud per kilometre, which is half the bandwidth necessary for video-based mapping.

Harold Goddijn, CEO of TomTom, said: “We’ve been working hard to create the HD Map needed for autonomous driving, including localisation attributes such as TomTom’s RoadDNA. It’s exciting to be launching this additional localisation layer with Bosch in the form of the Radar Road Signature – that greatly increases the robustness of localisation under all circumstances.”

“The Radar Road Signature is a milestone on the path towards automated driving. It will enable automated vehicles to reliably determine their location at all times,” says Bosch board of management member, Dr. Dirk Hoheisel.

Bosch wants to launch the Radar Road Signature onto the market in Europe and the U.S. by 2020 at the latest.

Visit TomTom on booth C190 at TU-Automotive.