Most of us live in places where driving directions are available and at your fingertips, so it might be surprising to discover that millions of roads around the world have yet to be mapped out. For over 10 years, volunteers from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project have been working to fill this gap by meticulously adding data and manually reviewing public satellite images and annotating roads, motorways and bridges. It is a scrupulous and tedious task. But now, thanks to artificial intelligence, there’s an easier way to cover more areas in less time.
With the assistance of Map With AI, a new service created by Facebook AI researchers and engineers, a team of mappers recently cataloged all the missing roads in Thailand and over 90% of the missing roads in Indonesia. Map With AI allowed them to map over 300,000 miles of roads in Thailand in just 18 months, going from 280,000 miles of roads covered to 600,000 miles. Doing it in the traditional way – without AI – would have taken ad additional 3-5 years, estimates Xiaoming Gao, a Facebook scientist who helped lead the project. “We were really excited about this result because it showed that Map With AI works on a large scale,” says Gao. Starting today, anyone will be able to use this tool, which includes access to road maps generated by AI in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda, with the launch of other countries over time. As part of Map With AI, Facebook is releasing their AI-based mapping tool, called RapiD, to the OSM community. RapiD is an improved version of the popular OSM iD editing tool. Designed to make adding and changing roads quick and easy to use for anyone, it also includes data integrity checks to ensure that new map changes are consistent and accurate.
