The opening was revealed by business development platform Luxinnovation, which wrote that the firm was working closely with a team from the University of Luxembourg’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) working on autonomous vehicles.

Luxinnovation wrote that in the coming months, Civil Maps would submit applications for R&D grants and cited the company CEO, Stefan Safko, as saying they could hire PhD students or postdoc students from the SnT team.

Civil Maps was founded in 2013 to avoid train collisions caused by poor weather or human error. They took raw data on train locations to create high-definition maps, technology which was applied to autonomous vehicles two years later. They developed their trademarked high-definition 3D maps of city surroundings known as Fingerprint Base Map, which takes snippets of data collected from the smart sensors in self-driving cars and encodes it into 3D maps.

According to Luxinnovation, it makes it possible to localise vehicles with centimetre-level accuracy.

Luxembourg is part of a cross-border testbed for autonomous vehicle technology, along with France and Germany. The lab involves a 206-kilometre circuit between Schengen, Saarbrücken and Metz for testing 5G technology for autonomous driving under real-life conditions.

According to Luxinnovation, the growth of autonomous driving technology in Europe pushed the company to branch out in Luxembourg.

Civil Maps, which has activities in India, China and the US, did not respond to Delano's request for further information.