Building better maps for machines: How Aaron Rogan is revolutionizing automated driving
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Widespread autonomous driving capabilities have remained elusive to the global automotive industry for years. Within this tricky world of innovation, Aaron Rogan, VP of Engineering at TomTom, is now leading a mission to develop the kind of maps needed to change driving as we know it. His impressive 20-year career in the geospatial industry, spanning startups and tech giants like Microsoft, Uber and Amazon, has led him to this transformative role in the future of transportation.
Aerial and satellite image processing, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), perception and prediction – you name it, and Aaron has worked on it. “Mapping and machine learning have been central to my career. I've built or led products at virtually every stage of the mapmaking process,” he says. So, when Aaron changed direction to join a promising startup, he eventually found himself missing the field he was most passionate about. One day he shared this with a former colleague, who told him about TomTom’s latest breakthroughs in mapping with Orbis Maps. “It piqued my interest. I could see a path forward and ways to scale faster and further than any other company had before,” he says. He reached out to TomTom right away, joining the team soon after.Cracking the code: Building better maps for machines
At TomTom, Aaron leads the ADAS (advanced driver-assistance system) and ADS (autonomous driving system) organization. Their goal is not just to improve maps for vehicles, but to innovate – achieving a major shift in the way maps are built, maintained and used across the company, industry and world. What does this look like? “We are creating highly detailed maps for every road, including the smallest rural roads, enabling unparalleled coverage and detail, globally” Aaron explains. To achieve this, Aaron and his teams are disrupting the industry by setting a new standard for scale, efficiency and quality in mapmaking. In the future, Aaron says that with this technology, HD map layers will serve as the primary base to derive all other map products. Ultimately, this opens the long-locked door to feasible maps for automated driving. Aaron sheds light on the context: “Historically, the high costs and complexity associated with building and maintaining HD maps have driven map-less approaches (to automated driving). However, at TomTom, I believe we’ve cracked the code.”With great innovation comes challenges
TomTom is a pioneer in commercial grade collaborative mapmaking, embracing a global community of map data sources to create maps with capabilities no one mapmaker could build alone.
The company’s unique approach to multi-source data integration is key to Aaron’s goal, enabling TomTom Orbis Maps to produce 3D lane geometry for every single road, even in areas with limited data. “We’re not dependent on any single data provider, which gives us unmatched flexibility in the industry,” Aaron notes. “And we can produce this HD content at a fraction of the cost and time compared to competitors.” Aaron elaborates for context: “We can process entire countries or states faster and more affordably than most can process individual cities. This gives us the ability to scale globally, paving the way for significant market disruption in the near future.” Every day, Aaron and his teams are making this possible – doing everything from using machine learning to generate ground truth data at scale, to retraining foundational models and leveraging continuous feedback loops to enhance accuracy and accelerate automation.Shaping the road ahead
“With TomTom Orbis Maps, we are redefining the very foundations of mapmaking,” Aaron says. his enthusiasm is palpable, and contagious. He, his teams and TomTom as a whole are helping the world access autonomous driving, which has the potential to cut congestion, improve safety and reduce emissions. “TomTom is in a truly unique position at this moment in time. The scale of the data we ingest daily, the diversity of source material we continue to collect and the partnerships we’ve cultivated allow us to achieve something unprecedented in mapping.” And there’s still a lot to be done. Are you looking to make your impact in the next generation of mapping? “It’s an incredibly exciting time to be part of TomTom as we pave the way for the future of mapping and set the stage for groundbreaking advancements in ADAS and beyond,” Aaron says.There’s no time like now to find your role alongside Aaron and his teams. See open roles at TomTom
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