On December 15, 2021, Youdao Zhitu and Hesai Technology officially signed a comprehensive strategic cooperation framework agreement, on the basis of long-term cooperation in the future, the two sides will aim at specific directions such as R&D iteration of autonomous driving technology, leapfrog development of intelligent transportation technology, and scale of smart logistics services, broaden the scope of cooperation, enhance the level of cooperation, and achieve mutual benefit and win-win and coordinated development. Moving towards the trillion-level commercial vehicle autonomous driving track, Youdao Zhitu aims to reach a scale of 10,000 in 2025.
There are huge opportunities for the commercial vehicle autonomous driving track
Autonomous driving is the "ultimate goal" of future intelligent vehicles, and the automatic driving of commercial vehicles can release huge social value in terms of life safety, transportation efficiency, energy conservation and environmental protection, and has great commercial possibilities.
In the specific scenarios of high intensity and high danger of cargo transportation work such as trunk lines, mining areas, and ports, the application of automatic driving of commercial vehicles can comprehensively improve road safety by replacing manpower and standardizing driving strategies, which is expected to reduce the number of traffic accident deaths by 48%, fill the gap of 10 million truck drivers, and reduce energy consumption by 10%.
SAIC's R&D strength is empowered, and 2 million kilometers of quasi-commercial operation are carried out
Youdao Zhitu's strong independent innovation strength is a solid foundation for this strategic cooperation to implement technology. As a new "science and technology innovation little giant" under SAIC, Youdao Zhitu has accumulated rich experience in the research and development and operation of commercial vehicle intelligent driving systems by combining SAIC's ten-year intelligent driving prospective research and development with the three-year quasi-commercial operation of Yangshan Port.
As early as July 2020, Youdao Zhitu's L4 level intelligent heavy truck products have opened quasi-commercial autonomous driving operations on the Donghai Bridge, with an operating mileage of more than 2 million kilometers, which has truly opened up the whole business chain process from intelligent vehicles, fleet management, logistics scheduling to port operations by embedding real operation scenarios and business systems, and has completed more than 60,000 TEUs of real transfer business.
As another core product of Youdao Zhitu, AIV product is a container intelligent transfer vehicle specially developed for the upgrading and transformation of traditional terminals during the 14th Five-Year Plan period. The product has four-wheel steering, two-way driving, crab row, automatic lane change, precision parking and other unique functions, can easily meet all kinds of special working conditions during the dock operation; the vehicle charging and replacing is optional, the power exchange time is only 5 minutes; and the introduction of road vehicle safety functions, in the traditional dock transformation of the port area is not closed and isolated, the collection card and AIV mixed running complex scene can also operate. At present, the product has realized the real ship operation in the mixed running scenario at the Four Wharves in Shanghai.
In the future, Youdao Zhitu will be led by scenarios, build a flexible and new business model of "technology + product + operation", achieve full field coverage, key market penetration, and lead the future development of the industry, with a goal of reaching 100,000+ capacity service network in 2025.
Join hands with Hesai qiang, and the sword refers to the scale of tens of thousands
Based on the high recognition of the self-developed technologies of both parties, Youdao Zhitu and Hesai Technology have reached a strategic cooperation aimed at the commercialization of future autonomous driving projects.
According to the agreement, Youdao Zhitu will be responsible for the research and development and mass production planning of L4 and L3 autonomous driving products, give full play to the advantages of Hesai Technology products, and develop autonomous vehicles suitable for them according to the needs of application scenarios; Hesai Technology will give full play to the technical advantages of lidar for many years to provide high-performance sensors and related services for L4 and L3 automatic driving products under Youdao Zhitu; at the same time, the two sides will carry out further deep-plow exploration on solid-state lidar application scenarios and deployments. Carry out in-depth cooperation with other business scenarios around the research and development iteration of autonomous driving technology, work together for the technological development of intelligent transportation, and work together with the large-scale landing of smart logistics services.
He Racing Class Semi-Solid-State LiDAR AT128
Image-level point cloud representation of the Hesai AT128
As the first company in the world to launch a LIDAR that has obtained ISO 26262 ASIL B functional safety product certification, Hesai has launched a variety of automotive-grade lidar, which not only has industry-leading performance and image-level point cloud performance, but also fully complies with the full-process closed-loop vehicle specification requirements from design to verification in terms of reliability. This strategic cooperation will be based on hesai technology's high-performance lidar, semi-solid-state lidar and other products, to fully ensure the reliable perception of Youdao Zhitu's autonomous driving products, and further improve its stable operation efficiency.
In the future, Youdao Zhitu will continue to solidly promote the independent research and development of autonomous driving core technologies, and march towards the trillion-level commercial vehicle autonomous driving track, with the goal of reaching a scale of 10,000 in 2025. Work with partners to accelerate the multi-scenario promotion and application of exploring autonomous driving technology, and contribute to the construction of smart transportation.