Mobileye NV today marked another milestone in its efforts to make autonomous vehicles a reality.

The company, which is currently in the process of being sold to Intel Corp, today inked a deal with Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. to produce maps for self-driving cars. As part of their collaboration, the Japanese auto giant will contribute anonymized data collected by its smart cars to Mobileye’s Road Experience Management platform. The service provides information about traffic signs, landmarks and other important environmental features continuously refreshed using crowdsourced video from vehicles.

Nissan relies on REM to support the ProPilot autonomous navigation system that it started rolling out last year. Sharing data from customers’ vehicles with Mobileye will help make the platform more accurate, which in turn should make ProPilot more competitive against Tesla Inc.’s AutoPilot and the other competing offerings out there.

Today’s partnership announcement didn’t specify what data Nissan will bring to the table, but the fact that REM relies primarily on video would indicate that it will provide measurements from car cameras. The alliance follows hot on the heels of Mobileye striking similar deals with BMW AG, Volkswagen and mapping provider HERE. The latter company is co-owned by BMW and two other German auto giants that can probably be expected to become involved with REM as well given how they’re working on their autonomous vehicle initiatives.

Daimler AG, one of the stakeholders in HERE, recently landed a deal to supply Mercedes-Benz vehicles for Uber Technologies Inc.’s self-driving fleet. The ride-sharing giant is also working with Mobileye as part of a pilot program that focuses on reducing the risk of accidents for its drivers.

The more companies join Mobileye’s ecosystem and embrace REM, the more accurate its maps should become. Intel will no doubt support the push once its acquisition of the firm completes. The chipmaker hopes that forging software partnerships with the world’s top auto maker will improve its odds of becoming their processor supplier of choice.

Rival Nvidia Corp. is pursuing a similar strategy. The company has teamed up with auto parts maker Robert Bosch GmbH, BMW and numerous other players over recent quarters to develop autonomous navigation systems that use its chips.

Image: Pixabay