Lyft introduces new autonomous technology car, acquires Blue Vision Labs for building maps

San Francisco-based on-demand transportation company Lyft has unveiled a brand new autonomous technology car – a Ford Fusion hybrid sedan – which is devised and built by the firm’s in-house team of self-driving car engineers.

The ride-hailing company also announced that it has acquired London-based augmented reality startup Blue Vision Labs to enable it in building maps with the help of computer vision for processing street-level imagery. With the acquisition, Blue Vision Labs will become the British center for the ride-hailing company’s Level 5 self-driving division.

In July last year, Lyft announced its plan of commencing the building of its own self-driving technology vehicles. Although, it was an audacious move for a ride-hailing car at that time, especially as giant tech companies and automobile behemoths were in the race and were investing huge and developing cutting-edge technology for autonomous technology vehicles, now the company has 300 technicians and engineers in its Palo Alto headquarters as well as another offshore office in Munich.

The acquisition of Blue Vision Labs by Lyft is valued at nearly USD72 million and the deal has the potential to touch more than USD100 million, as an additional USD30 million is kept for the achievement of certain milestones.

Founded by graduates from Imperial College London and the University of Oxford in 2016, Blue Vision Labs has developed accurate, shared augmented reality software. Blue Vision Labs’ 40 people team will play a key role in Lyft’s autonomous driving operations in the U.K.

Blue Vision Labs develops collaborative augmented reality experiences using simple techniques such as a smartphone camera. The firm’s technology is revolutionary as it can crowdsource extremely detailed 3D maps of cities just by using a smartphone or other camera mounted on a vehicle’s dashboard.

These maps enable a vehicle to understand precisely its location, all the things around it, its next course of action, with millimeter-level accuracy.

This will immensely help Lyft as it seeks to build high-resolution maps that will enable its autonomous technology vehicles in navigating complex environments. The ride-hailing company can combine the AR startup’s camera-based maps with its geometric maps developed using LIDAR sensors mounted to the vehicles’ roofs.

Although Lyft’s autonomous technology vehicles are being tested on public roads in San Francisco and the rest of California, the testing is still in the nascent stages. The company is also running a fleet of autonomous technology cars in Las Vegas in collaboration with Aptiv, the autonomous driving technology arm of international automotive parts supplier Delphi.

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