The “Here and Now” of HD Mapping for Connected Autonomous Driving

This chapter is dedicated to the concept, characteristics, components, and structures of high-definition (HD) maps and their state of development for autonomous driving. The self-driving vehicle is essentially a rolling supercomputer, controlledmore by its software than its hardware.HDmaps assume a decisive control role in guiding such a vehicle safely and efficiently through a dynamic environment. Compared to standardmaps, HDmaps are fundamentally different in terms of generation procedure, map content, map scale and target users. HDmapping is analytically composed of three elements—the “here” mapping, the “now” mapping and the integrated “here” and “now” mapping. The main tasks associated with each element are demonstrated with best practice examples. Key research challenges include extraction of meaningful driving scenarios, edge-case modeling in the absence of training data, predicting contextual human behavior, and safety-first decision making in moral dilemmas.