Report: 3D Mapping Costs Remain Steep

Dec. 3, 2019—Argo AI and Aptiv publicly released their own data sets and shared parts of their own maps of cities where they're testing self-driving cars, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

A lidar sensor, which sits on the roof of a car and collects some of the most detailed information about a road, costs anywhere between $70,000 and $1 million, noted Christoph Mertz, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, according to the report.

Even before accounting for the expense of building such a map, it costs at least a few hundred thousand dollars to produce a prototype self-driving test vehicle.

Mertz envisions a future in which the government is more involved to cut out some of the redundancy within the industry.