The balance of 2021 is almost exhausted, and in the annual inventory of major auto media, it is indispensable for Internet technology giants to enter the car market.
In this wave of new car manufacturing 2.0, Baidu has run in the forefront with years of accumulation in the field of automatic driving. Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li proposed a new concept - car robot, he believes that the future of intelligent cars are more like intelligent robots, the shape of the robot will be very similar to a car.
At the Baidu World Congress in August, Baidu showed off a concept car product for an automotive robot, which not only broke the conventional appearance, but also directly eliminated the steering wheel and pedals inside. At that time, Baidu did not disclose the landing time and cost of the product.
However, at the recent Baidu Create2021 (Baidu AI Developer Conference), Robin Li said that its car company Jidu Automobile will announce the first concept car in 2022 and mass-produce and deliver the first car robot in 2023.
But this is not enough, at the next day's autonomous driving sub-forum of the same conference, Baidu Apollo X plan to show the automotive robot jointly built with multiple ecological partners, covering all fields such as passenger transportation, freight, and life services.
Auto robot "expansion"
The Apollo X plan is a new plan launched by Baidu's autonomous driving platform in December 2020, which aims to form an ecological alliance by supporting unicorns in multiple dimensions such as talent, technology, capital, and scenarios.
In this sub-forum, the "Apollon" bus robot in Baidu Apollo ecology, the DeepWay trunk logistics car robot, the Huaneng Yimin autonomous mining card car robot, and the Neolithic retail car robot were collectively unveiled.
For Apollon, many people may not be unfamiliar, it is a cooperative development between Baidu and Golden Dragon Bus, debuted in 2017, and officially mass-produced off the production line in 2018. In August this year, the new generation of Apollon II was officially unveiled, and the new car is equipped with two 40-line lidars, which has 155 comprehensive capabilities compared with the previous generation.
Baidu Apollo Mine Special Operation Auto robot has fully autonomous driving capabilities, Baidu said that it is China's first intelligent solution to achieve all-round coverage of vehicle and road cloud in the mining field, which can achieve accurate location and operation status information through the vehicle-road collaboration program, and can continue to evolve and support cross-work surface full-process operation in the future.
In the field of trunk logistics, Baidu and Shiqiao jointly established DeepWay, and released the first smart heavy-duty truck concept product in September this year - Xingtu 1 generation. Baidu said that trunk logistics automotive robots can be driven by data and self-learning, so that the automatic driving ability of high-speed heavy truck scenarios can be rapidly iterated. In terms of mass production landing, Deepway expects to invest 1,000 heavy trucks in 2023, making Deepway an old DRIVER of AI in the field of trunk logistics.
If Baidu previously focused on the field of passenger cars with automotive robots, then now Baidu has expanded it to multiple subdivision scenarios such as buses, trunk logistics, warehousing and distribution, mine and port operations, etc., which basically covers the main direction of the current autonomous driving technology landing.
The technical support behind it
Behind the landing of diversified automotive robots, the open platform of autonomous driving plays an important supporting role.
Baidu began to study autonomous driving technology in 2013, and in 2017 officially opened the Apollo autonomous driving open source software platform to the public, opening up autonomous driving capabilities to all companies and developers in the field of autonomous driving for free.
So far, Baidu Apollo Autonomous Driving Open Platform has completed 11 iterations, with more than 80,000 developers in 135 countries around the world, more than 210 partners, and a total of 700,000 open source codes, which has grown into the world's most active autonomous driving open platform.
At this event, Apollo was upgraded to version 7.0 and officially released, achieving a milestone complete evolution from code to tools, from open source platform to tooled platform.
On the basis of the four open source platforms of cloud services, open source software, hardware development, and vehicle certification, a series of upgrades are provided, including the one-stop practice cloud platform Apollo Studio, the industry's leading simulation service, and the efficient new model.
At the level of the cloud service platform, the "data pipeline" service that is popular with developers in version 6.0 was officially upgraded to Apollo Studio in Apollo 7.0, covering the whole process of cloud toolchain for developers from the machine to the car, so as to provide developers with a one-stop practice platform experience.
At the simulation platform level, Apollo 7.0 launched the industry's first PnC reinforcement learning model training and simulation evaluation platform. The platform has a series of advantages such as data realism, powerful functions, comprehensive evaluation standards, and scalable architecture, which is expected to provide a unified verification standard for reinforcement learning research.
At the level of open source software platform, Apollo 7.0 upgrades the perception and prediction algorithm modules and introduces three deep learning-based models of MaskPillars, SMOKE and Inter-TNT, which can effectively reduce missed detection, jitter and other issues.
To sum up, Apollo 7.0 not only has full code capabilities open, but also provides a full-stack toolchain for autonomous driving, which is easier to use, more advanced, and more efficient to help developers use platform capabilities.
Che Yun Summary:
Baidu, which has been working in the field of autonomous driving for many years, is sparing no effort to promote the mass production and commercialization of autonomous driving, and diversified automotive robots are the carriers that connect technology and scenarios.
Go alone fast, go far. Baidu is not alone, through cooperation with ecological partners, the use of technology empowerment, accelerate the subdivision of automotive robot scenarios, and jointly achieve a better future of autonomous driving.