Baidu released Apollo 7.0 to accelerate the commercialization of autonomous driving

Abstract: After more than four years of exploration, Apollo has reached the time to create revenue for Baidu

The 100-billion-level cake of the self-driving track is tempting enough, but there is still a long way to go from large-scale commercialization. How to accelerate the connection between autonomous driving technology and industry has become the direction of wrestling for players in the track.

On December 29, at the Baidu AI Developer Conference, the autonomous driving open platform Apollo 7.0 was released. Zhang Liang, head of the ecology of Baidu's autonomous driving platform, said that Apollo7.0 is an important support for the landing of Baidu's diversified automotive robots, which will further improve the ability of automotive robots to land in the industry.

Compared with the previous version, Zhang Liang said that Apollo 7.0 implements an upgrade from an open source platform to a tool-based platform. It provides developers with a one-stop practice platform Apollo studio, launches the industry's first PnC reinforcement learning model training and simulation evaluation platform, and upgrades the perception and prediction algorithm modules.

At present, through cooperation with various industrial companies, the commercialization exploration of the Apollo platform in the industry focuses on passenger cars, buses, trunk logistics, warehousing and distribution, mine and port operations, etc. Baidu Chairman and CEO Robin Li said in November that Baidu Apollo has grown into the world's most active open platform for autonomous driving, with more than 210 global ecological partners.

Neolithic unmanned vehicles are one of the cooperative enterprises. Its CEO Yu Enyuan introduced that Neolithic began to cooperate with the Apollo platform in 2018, mainly used in scenarios such as unmanned trucks, and established large-scale operation networks in Beijing and Shanghai. As of July 2021, there are more than 120 unmanned vehicles in Beijing Yizhuang and more than 100 unmanned vehicles in Shanghai.

Deepway, a new truck-making force in the autonomous driving freight track jointly incubated by Baidu and Shiqiao, focuses on the automatic driving capabilities of high-speed heavy-duty truck scenes, and is expected to invest 1,000 heavy-duty trucks in 2023 to become an old AI driver in the field of trunk logistics.

Baidu's expectations for the landing of the Apollo platform industry are quite high. Robin Li said in a letter released in March that automatic driving is about to usher in a breakthrough point, and Apollo has developed three business models, the first of which is to provide Apollo automatic driving technology solutions for host manufacturers. He proposed that in the second half of 2021, Apollo intelligent driving will usher in the peak of mass production, a new car will be listed every month, and it is expected that the front-loading mass production vehicles will reach 1 million units in the next 3 to 5 years.

Behind or the anxiety of Baidu's business model. The Internet traffic dividend has peaked, and as Baidu's core business, the revenue growth of online marketing business has slowed down. Both the capital market and Baidu itself need a more imaginative business.

Autonomous driving has clearly become one of Baidu's priorities. As early as 2013, Baidu has entered the field of autonomous driving, and Apollo's autonomous driving plan is released in 2017. Up to now, the Apollo autonomous driving open platform has completed 11 iterations, with more than 80,000 developers in 135 countries around the world, and a total of 700,000 lines of open source code.

After more than four years of exploration, Apollo has reached the time to generate revenue for Baidu. But whether the market can pay for this still needs time to test.

(The author |.) Si Wenwen Editor | Zhang Shuo)