A few days ago, It was learned from Baidu officials that at the Baidu Create 2021 (Baidu AI Developer Conference) held today (December 27), Robin Li, founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, said in his opening speech: "Intelligent transportation will be a major change that will affect the next 10-40 years, so that China's first-tier cities will no longer need to limit purchases and traffic within 5 years, and basically solve the congestion problem within 10 years."
A few months ago, Baidu released a car robot, without steering wheels and pedals, with L5 self-driving capabilities, and today, Baidu once again released the "roadside automatic driving system" - AIR intelligent road system.
Compared with automotive robots, air intelligent road systems are more "grounded". Through the intelligent upgrading of roadside equipment, the AIR intelligent road system has achieved real-time optimization of "city-level" information control at more than 2,000 intersections across the country, and has achieved safe escort of vehicles on millions of kilometers of roads across the country, greatly reducing urban road congestion and delays, and improving traffic efficiency by more than 15-30%. Taking Baoding, Hebei Province, as an example, through the deployment of the AIR intelligent road system, the average annual growth of motor vehicles in the core area of Baoding in the past two years has been 7%, but the congestion index has dropped by 6% through the optimization of information control in some road sections.
Robin Li said that the AIR intelligent road system makes use of Baidu's years of deep cultivation in the field of automatic driving, has the same source of perception, decision-making and control capabilities as Baidu Apollo technology, cameras, lidar, millimeter wave radar to enhance the perception of intelligent road system; and Kunlun chip, Apollo, flying paddle deep learning platform blessed road edge computing platform, is the "brain" of intelligent road system, while continuous self-learning, continuous evolution. Baidu calls the AIR intelligent road system "the automatic driving system at the end of the road".
The AIR intelligent road system not only solves the current traffic problems, but also faces the future and accelerates the arrival of the era of automatic driving. The AIR intelligent road system can make automatic driving safer, real-time collaborative perception of all objects, solve the difficult case of long tail of automatic driving, and achieve an intersection pass rate of 99%; at the same time, it can achieve real-time and wide-reaching early warning of all dangerous events on the road, and coordinate active operation management to effectively reduce traffic accidents by 90%. The smart car plus the smart road is Baidu's exploration and answer to the "China model" of high-quality development of the transportation powerhouse.
Li said that China has about 280 million cars, and the speed of traffic in large cities during peak commuting periods is only about 20 kilometers. By 2030, car ownership will reach 450 million, and there is an urgent need to find new solutions for transportation. The strategic guidance at the national level and the innovative practice at the enterprise level complement each other, which will accelerate the application of artificial intelligence, 5G, cloud computing and other technologies in the field of transportation, accelerate the construction of intelligent transportation systems, and make travel better.