The streets of the world are changing fast. This is probably most obvious to the people and organizations that have the streets as their workplace—logistics, delivery, and ride-sharing companies spring to mind. When most of us just need to get from A to B, the drivers at these companies are looking for parking spots and building entrances to pick up and drop off goods and people as fast and painless as possible. When this information is missing from the map, time and ultimately money is lost at a fast pace.

Enter the Mapillary Dashcam, the world’s first end-to-end encrypted mapping dashcam that turns any vehicle into a mapping van. The Mapillary Dashcam has been available to contributors through our camera grant program since June 2019. We recently updated the firmware to include end-to-end encryption and we are now making it available for commercial fleets. The Mapillary Dashcam fits in the palm of your hand and automatically captures imagery as soon as the vehicle starts, which means that it requires no extra work from the driver. This demand for map data is growing fast across the board, and the camera was developed together with Pittasoft, the leading dashcam developer, to help companies that aren’t mapping companies and don’t necessarily have in-house mapping teams, but still depend on updated and detailed maps to serve their customers.

Cities are constantly changing. Every time a new road is built and new traffic signs are added, the map is broken until it’s been updated with the new road data. The image above shows the problem—a Mapillary contributor is out mapping in Dallas, US, from the coverage on Mapillary it seems the driver is going through fields. In reality, there is a new road that hasn’t yet been added to the map. In short, the map is broken. Once the imagery is on Mapillary, anyone can use the imagery and data to update their map of interest.

Logistics, delivery, and ride-sharing fleets are now able to capture and keep dense imagery for mapping purposes for full working days as they go about their day-to-day business. The camera is flexible enough to be moved around to whatever vehicle makes the most sense, and it has the ability to capture up to 150,000 images in one eight-hour session. Once the images are uploaded to Mapillary, it’s only a matter of hours before they’re available on the platform. We use computer vision to detect and extract information like traffic signs and road markings from the images, and positioning the data on the map. This includes turn restrictions, stopping and parking signs, access restrictions, speed limits, and many more.

But it’s not just the machine-generated data that is useful to companies that navigate the streets. Whether it comes to house entrances, building sites, or route optimization, the images themselves are an important data source to get an understanding of what the route looks like from start to finish. Realizing only once you’ve arrived that there is no parking nearby a parcel drop-off point could result in significant delays. These kinds of map issues are becoming more and more pressing as online shopping is picking up, while promises on fast deliveries are getting increasingly ambitious.

With the Mapillary Dashcam, fleets are able to take control of collecting the map data they need for fixing the maps that they depend on. And by uploading the images to Mapillary, the data is available to update and improve the map in a matter of hours.

Finally, a way to say goodbye to broken maps. Contact us to learn more about how the Mapillary Dashcam can help your fleet to collect the data needed for fixing your map.

/Sandra, VP of Data Acquisition