Baidu Li Zhenyu: Autonomous driving is becoming the focus of competition for smart cars

"With a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial revolution, China's automobile is undergoing a major change once in a century, electrification has opened the prelude to the automobile industry, and artificial intelligence, automatic driving, and vehicle-road collaboration are reconstructing future cars, future transportation and future cities." At the China Electric Vehicle 100 Forum (2022) held on March 26, Li Zhenyu, senior vice president of Baidu Group and general manager of the intelligent driving business group, pointed out.

Looking to the future of cars, Baidu believes that it will have a new species with self-evolution capabilities, it will have emotional and intelligent robots, not only with L4-level or L5-level self-driving capabilities, but also able to drive safer than humans. It also has multi-mode interaction capabilities such as voice and face recognition, which can analyze the potential needs of users, take the initiative to provide services, and is an intelligent assistant that faithfully accompanies human travel. In addition, it has the ability to learn and upgrade itself, and can serve humans in a variety of scenarios.

Facing the development of future transportation, Li Zhenyu believes that in the next 10 or even 40 years, the integration of vehicles and roads is the only way for transportation development, from digitalization (human drivers & on-demand traffic guidance), to networking (a small amount of unmanned driving & environmental information assistance) to automation (fully unmanned driving / integrated decision-making).

With the upgrading of the future transportation system, the increasing popularity of automotive robots, rich intelligent networking scenarios will be applied to quemo, urban planning, energy supply, communication services, industrial development, etc. corresponding innovation changes, technological innovation in the transportation and travel industry, so that urban governance, people's lives are better, people enjoy their travel, things flow freely, our lives will become safer, more convenient, efficient, economical and green.

Innovation Opportunity 1: Autonomous driving is becoming a competitive spot for smart cars.

With the input of all parties, the support of government policies, and the competition of related enterprises, the advent of the era of autonomous driving will be accelerated. In the past year, the development of autonomous driving has accelerated significantly. In May last year, the Shougang Park in Beijing was the first to open up commercial unmanned operations, and in January this year, a large-scale unmanned test of Beijing's open roads began, driving into the social opening road in the core area of Yizhuang.

At the same time, it is also seen that autonomous driving is also accelerating the operation of commercialization. In November last year, Beijing officially opened the first pilot of autonomous driving travel services in China, and autonomous driving is moving from technical verification and product development to a new stage of commercial layout. Baidu received the first operating licenses to put services in a real environment to receive market experience. Self-driving services have begun to slowly become one of the commuting options for some ordinary people. At present, Baidu's radish run has been opened to the public in eight cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.

Innovation Opportunity 2: The integrated development of vehicle and road cloud maps is the key path for China's auto industry to "change lanes and overtake".

In recent years, traditional transportation is realizing intelligent upgrading, and this intelligent transformation can be understood as "one digital base", "three intelligent engines", and "N ecological applications" supported above.

In a simple way: "a digital base" is the digital upgrade of the vehicle road cloud map, the "three intelligent engines" are based on automatic driving, vehicle-road collaboration, MaaS travel services as the core technology, and "N ecological applications" is to form a new industrial ecology on the basis of the intelligent base of the vehicle road cloud map. The overall architecture, future-oriented, but also serve the present.

Chelu Yuntu provides services and creates value for all participants, and the vast number of developer ecosystem partners and upstream and downstream industries can carry out rich application development, such as future-oriented autonomous driving travel, new species in the park, and intelligent signal lights, intelligent parking, and intelligent network services that serve the present. These applications have made significant progress over the past period.

The digital upgrade of the vehicle road cloud map can make the traffic more efficient. In Baoding, Hebei Province, Baidu's "AI Intelligent Traffic Management Brain" allows traffic lights to see the state of intersection traffic, understand the evolution of traffic, and dynamically adjust the timing strategy of traffic lights in real time, that is, the lights see the car, and the car is adjusted in a timely manner when the car comes. At present, a green wave belt has been formed on many main roads, allowing the market to travel at a green light, no longer relying on good luck, and the travel time has been shortened by 20%.

In Changsha, Baidu has established a parking management platform covering the whole area, combining static traffic management and dynamic services for citizens, which has improved the phenomenon of urban parking difficulties and parking chaos, and effectively improved the traffic efficiency of the urban core area. Parking spaces in the core area, the turnover rate increased by 3 times, and the turnover efficiency increased by 56%.

The wide application of vehicle road cloud map in intelligent network connection can also create greater value. In the high-speed scene, in the past, because of the bad weather such as rain and fog, roads were often closed, because some were requirements for safety management, and some were limited by the actual technical level, and there would be some unreasonable road closures, which also brought great economic losses.

In fact, the smart highway can effectively solve the problem of foggy weather traffic. Seeing the problem of the vehicle end perspective through vehicle-road coordination can ensure the safe driving of vehicles, which is expected to greatly reduce unreasonable road closures and traffic accidents, and realize quasi-all-weather traffic on highways.

In the complex scene of the city, the collaborative application of the vehicle-road cloud map is accelerating the scale of autonomous driving. At present, the most difficult thing in urban roads is intersections, and there will be some problems that cannot be solved in scenarios based on bicycle intelligence.

For example, signal light occlusion, blind spot perception, ultra-long-range visual distance, and some obstacles, map updates, etc., but after the intersection has been upgraded, these problems can be effectively solved, the infrastructure on the side of the road has the ability to perceive and plan decisions, high-precision maps can provide dynamic updates to the information of road conditions, and the data in the cloud can provide assisted decision-making, complementing each other.

At the same time, there is a 5G security officer in the cloud, who can provide remote security redundancy, and the collaborative application of the vehicle-road cloud map can bring the god perspective shown in the figure, support the control and execution of the vehicle at the end of the car, break the limitations of bicycle perception and scene understanding, reduce the complexity of difficult scenes, and improve the traffic efficiency of intersections.

In May last year, Baidu, together with the Intelligent Industry Research Institute of Tsinghua University and the Beijing Advanced Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone, released the Apollo Air plan, which jointly verified that vehicle-road collaboration can make autonomous driving more economical and safer. Li Zhenyu said that Baidu firmly believes that the technical value and market value of vehicle-road synergy are the key path for China's auto industry to achieve lane change and overtaking.

At the end of the speech, Li Zhenyu said, "Baidu Apollo has been adhering to the concept of openness, empowering the whole society with leading technology and open platform, opening up capabilities, sharing resources, accelerating innovation, and achieving a win-win situation. We believe that the development of intelligent vehicles and intelligent transportation comes from industrial technological breakthroughs and close collaboration between upstream and downstream. (This article was first published on titanium media App)