Do you earn a living by hustling for ride-hailing companies or driving delivery gigs" There may be a new way to add a few extra dollars to your bottom line while helping to lay the groundwork for autonomous vehicles.
Mapping ever-changing road environments is one of the trickiest aspects of preparing self-driving vehicles for the road, and there?s a new company that aims to do just that by crowdsourcing location information from the cameras on drivers? smartphones. In return, drivers can earn 2 to 5 cents per mile.
Founded by a team that includes two former engineers who worked on Tesla Motors? Autopilot semi-autonomous feature, Silicon Valley startup Lvl5 is recruiting drivers to download an app called Payver. With the app running and smartphones mounted on a dashboard, the company?s engineers can use computer-vision software to distill a high-definition portrait of the vehicle?s surroundings. ?Every self-driving car needs a map,? said Andrew Kouri, Lvl5?s co-founder and CEO. ?It?s more than just a Google map?it needs to be a high-definition map of everything on the road, where sidewalks are, crossing lights, and everything else you can imagine that would help a car know how and where to drive. What it comes down to is that nobody has these maps at scale right now.?

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?What it comes down to is that nobody has these

maps at scale right now.?

? Andrew Kouri, Lvl5

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That?s not for lack of trying. At least a half-dozen companies, including Mobileye, Civil Maps, He...