Toyota subsidiary Woven Planet Holdings has bought CARMERA, an American-based spatial AI company, which “specialises in bringing next-generation road intelligence to automated mobility at scale”. CARMERA is planning to base its European operations in London.

This is the second major deal for Woven Planet in North America, following the April 2021 announcement to acquire Level 5, the self-driving division of Lyft.

Woven Alpha says it focuses on exploring new strategic areas for business expansion and incubates several innovative projects such as Woven City and Arene, which is Woven Planet’s open software platform. AMP is a connected crowdsourced software platform that supports the creation, development and distribution of high definition maps.

The Woven Alpha team plans to develop AMP to become the most globally comprehensive road and lane network HD map platform, enabling high-precision localization support to automated vehicles. It says the acquisition of CARMERA will accelerate AMP’s shift from the R&D stage to the next phase of commercialisation by bolstering the platform’s engineering team with top experts in the development of HD maps. In addition, it will provide access to CARMERA’s map update, change management and IoT sensing technology.

It says that together the teams will tap into CARMERA’s ability to successfully update HD maps from crowdsourced, camera-based inputs―a significantly cheaper and faster approach than traditional methods.

(Picture – Carmera video)