HERE announces HERE Electronic Horizon

Las Vegas – CES 2017 – HERE, the Open Location Platform company, today announced the launch of HERE Electronic Horizon, software that helps vehicles know and react to what lies ahead on the road without driver involvement.

The introduction of HERE Electronic Horizon means that HERE now offers a full location technology stack for the car that simplifies and shortens time of development for automakers, and meets their needs today right through to fully autonomous driving.

“For people to let go of the wheel, it’s vital that they come to trust their cars,” said Ralf Herrtwich, Head of Automotive at HERE. “This new piece of software helps build that trust by telling the car what lies ahead so it can drive better on its own. We believe automakers will also appreciate the benefits of this new software in vehicle development. For too long, they have grappled with the complexity of working with multiple suppliers. By combining this new software with HERE content and services, automakers can now deploy a complete and future-proof location solution for the car and do so fast.”

How it works

HERE Electronic Horizon is software embedded within the vehicle that pulls in map data and dynamic road event data from the cloud to create a simplified representation of the road ahead – with a range of a few hundred meters to several kilometres. It then feeds that model of the road to the vehicle’s advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to optimise the performance of its engine and safety systems. All this happens without any driver involvement.

A number of ADAS functions benefit from HERE Electronic Horizon. These include predictive powertrain control for maximising fuel efficiency, adaptive cruise control, adaptive lighting, night vision and object recognition.

HERE Electronic Horizon also functions when there is no internet connection by leveraging the vehicle’s cached map data.

Supports highly and fully autonomous driving

Upon its commercial launch in early 2017, HERE Electronic Horizon is expected to be the first such available software that supports the forthcoming ADASIS version 3 specification. This means it also works with high definition map data and easily connects to HERE’s HD Live Map cloud service, which delivers a range of high definition map data, road event data and driver behaviour information to assist vehicles with positioning, localisation and strategy planning.

Multiple automakers are already utilising HERE Electronic Horizon in vehicle tests and pre-production vehicles, with HERE expecting it to be brought to production vehicles in 2017.

HERE offers HERE Electronic Horizon as a standalone product or integrated with its HD Live Map Client or HERE Auto SDK automotive solutions.