China's autonomous driving circle can not be bypassed by the "Tsinghua Gang" and "Baidu Faction"

Author: Jeff

Recently, a number of media reported that Zhang Jianyong, assistant vice president of WEILAI autonomous driving, will leave his job in the near future and will start a business in the field of automatic driving in the future. For the doctor who graduated from Tsinghua University majoring in automotive engineering, industry insiders gave a high evaluation: "There is no other company on the market now, and there is enough strength and corresponding seats to be able to catch him." ”

Doing autonomous driving in China has more or less something to do with Tsinghua University. The sensational effect caused by Zhang Jianyong's departure in the industry has once again focused on the well-known "Tsinghua Gang" in the field of autonomous driving in China. Some people say that the "Tsinghua Gang" occupies almost half of China's autonomous driving technology, and even the "Baidu Faction", which is also well-known in the industry, is also the foundation of the "Tsinghua Gang".

The love-hate relationship between the "Baidu Faction" and the "Tsinghua Gang"

Talking about autonomous driving in China, Baidu is a topic that cannot be avoided.

In 2015, Baidu began to invest heavily in the field of autonomous driving. Wang Jin, then vice president of Baidu Technology, led the establishment of the Autonomous Driving Division (L4 Division), and it took only about a week to pull up a team of three or four hundred people.

Many of these people later became leaders in the field of autonomous driving, and they were also affectionately known as "Baidu Pie". But when we cut open the "Baidu Sect", we found that it actually hid the core of the "Tsinghua Gang".

In 2016, Baidu's unmanned vehicle road testing work was in full swing, and what people did not expect was that the L4 business unit began to run everything. Industry insiders generally believe that the trigger for this incident was Yu Kai pulling Huang Chang away from Baidu.

In 2015, Yu Kai, who was regarded as the "initiator of Baidu autonomous driving", pulled Huang Chang, the main architect of the laboratory, to leave Baidu and founded Horizon to concentrate on "China's AI chips".

Huang Chang, a Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University, joined Baidu's American R&D Center in 2012 and participated in the establishment of Baidu Deep Learning Research Institute the following year, serving as a senior scientist and chief R&D architect. Later, as the co-founder of Horizon, he began to lead the research and development of The artificial intelligence processor architecture BPU independently developed by Horizon and the chip, toolchain, algorithm and other related basic technology platforms based on the architecture.

A year after Yu Kai pulled Huang Chang away from Baidu, he was regarded as the "second in command" of the L4 business unit, and Peng Jun, the founding member of Baidu's automatic driving project and chief architect of the automatic driving department, also dragged Lou Tiancheng, a disciple from Tsinghua University, to leave Baidu to start Xiaoma Zhixing.

After receiving his bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University, Peng Jun went to Stanford University to pursue a doctorate. After graduation, he joined Google as a software engineer and later joined Baidu as the chief architect of the autonomous driving department. During this period, Peng Jun became acquainted with Lou Tiancheng. Lou Tiancheng was once qualified as a guarantee from Tsinghua University and was the first "Yao Class" student. In 2016, he joined Baidu American Research Institute to participate in the technology research and development of unmanned vehicles, and then followed Peng Jun to leave Baidu and enter Xiaoma Zhixing.

Now Xiaoma Zhixing, behind the two major group car investors of Toyota Motor and China FAW, has been deployed in multiple tracks such as Robotaxi and trucks, and has grown into a dark horse with an autonomous driving technology valuation of up to $8 billion.

Peng Jun once said in a later interview that the advantage of large companies is that they can invest a lot of resources and talents in the research and development of autonomous driving technology, but there is less innovation and staying away from the market is the reason why they left Baidu.

Similar to the reason why Peng Jun left Baidu, there is another representative figure of the "Tsinghua Gang" - Ni Kai, the founder and CEO of Heduo Technology.

After graduating from Tsinghua University, Ni Kai received a ph.D. in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has the reputation of "China's first driverless person". In 2013, Baidu's driverless project started, ni Kai participated in it, and led the project throughout the process. Ni Kai hopes to move forward the commercialization of autonomous driving as a whole and develop in a direction that he feels is more suitable. So he chose to leave Baidu, join LeTV Automobile, and finally founded Heduo Technology.

The Tsinghua Gang has supported half of China's autonomous driving sky

Strictly speaking, the "Tsinghua Gang" almost supports half of the domestic automatic driving sky.

According to the data, in 1980, the Department of Automotive Engineering of Tsinghua University joined the research on autonomous driving technology when it was established, and for more than 40 years, Tsinghua University exported a large number of talents for the automotive industry, especially in the field of automatic driving. Tsinghua's scholars are scattered like stars, and they have become evangelists in the fields of intelligent cars and automatic driving.

In 2012, Deng Bo, a graduate of tsinghua university's automotive department, founded Suzhou Zhihua after leaving Changan Automobile Research Institute. Deng Bo once said that Zhihua will start from L1-L2 level automatic driving and then extend to L3 and L4 level automatic driving.

At present, the company has successfully developed a number of intelligent and safe driving systems such as lane departure alarm system, forward collision warning system, panoramic image system, reversing image assist, etc., and many products have been applied to more than a dozen automobile brands such as GAC and Geely.

In 2013, Li Yifan, who graduated from the Department of Precision Instruments of Tsinghua University, and Xiang Shaoqing, the senior of the same department, founded Hesai Technology in Silicon Valley and settled in Shanghai in 2014, whose main business is autonomous laser radar and laser natural gas telemetry systems. At present, Hesai Technology's products are all over the world in many countries and regions, according to the official of Hesai, more than 50% of the 65 companies announced by the California DMV in the United States that have obtained driverless public road test licenses have been customers of Hesai.

Also in 2013, Xia Huaxia, who graduated from Tsinghua University and worked at Google and Baidu, joined Meituan at the invitation of alumnus Wang Xing and became the chief scientist of Meituan. The unmanned vehicle project developed by the meituan technical team led by Xia Huaxia has attracted nearly 20 universities, research institutes and enterprises at home and abroad, including Tsinghua University, the University of California, Berkeley, beijing intelligent vehicle industry innovation center, etc., and has completed trial operation in Xiong'an, Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai.

In 2014, Xia Heng and He Xiaopeng, who graduated from Tsinghua University with a major in automotive engineering, and He Tao, who is also an alumnus of Tsinghua University, co-founded Xiaopeng Motors. Prior to that, Xia Heng was responsible for the development of control systems for GAC new energy vehicles and intelligent vehicles at the GAC Research Institute, and He Tao was the head of R&D of GAC New Energy Intelligent Electric Vehicles. In 2019, Wu Xinzhou, the former head of Qualcomm's autonomous driving R&D team and a talented son of Tsinghua University, also joined Xiaopeng Motors, responsible for the overall technical route planning, business and team management of Xiaopeng Motors' autonomous driving in the United States and China.

In 2015, Zhang Dezhao, who graduated from the Department of Automotive Engineering of Tsinghua University, brought several division brothers - Wang Xiao, Li Xiaofei, Zhang Fang, huo Shuhao into the tide of entrepreneurship and established Zhixinger. Smart Walker focuses on the "brain" research and development of driverless cars, providing an overall solution for driverless vehicles in multiple scenarios. The company has successively obtained investment from Houan Capital, Baidu, JD.com and many other well-known institutions, and has realized the commercialization of different products in the fields of robotaxi, robobus, special vehicles and sanitation, such as last year, it won 100 orders for T3 travel and more than 100 special patrol car orders, and its commercial landing ability is industry-leading.

In 2017, Li Yan, who graduated from the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, returned from the UCAR North American R&D Center to join Wenyuan Zhixing as co-founder and CTO after creating the autonomous driving technology (L2) research and development system in the UCAR system. Today, Wenyuan Zhixing has become the first autonomous driving company in China to have the qualification to carry out online ride-hailing business.

In 2018, Liu Feilong, who graduated from Tsinghua University with rich experience in automotive engineering, decided to return from North America to build an advanced high-speed autonomous driving research and development company for mass production, so hongjing intelligent driving, a provider of full-stack automatic driving system solutions, was born. At present, in the ECU hardware design, software algorithm development, supplier system, simulation, system optimization and integration, etc., Hongjing Intelligent Driving has launched relevant programs, and last year reached cooperation with JacHuai Automobile and Horizon, and its technical products are rapidly landing in mass production models.

In 2019, Zhang Jian, who received a doctorate in artificial intelligence from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, and Liang Shuang and Yu Chunlei, who also graduated from Tsinghua University, jointly established Superstar Future, which is committed to providing vehicle-grade software and hardware integration solutions.

Also founded in 2019, the three founders of Qingzhou Zhihang, Yu Qian, Hou Cong, and Hao Jingshan, are all from Tsinghua University. Light Boat Zhihang focused the unmanned application scenarios on the complex traffic environment of the city and launched the "Driven-by-QCraft" L4 automatic driving solution. Its first-generation solution mainly focuses on medium and low-speed scenarios with fixed routes, aiming to help create urban driverless mobile spaces and establish microcirculation systems in urban roads.

In addition, Shan Jizhang, founder and CEO of Black Sesame Technology, Qiu Wei, chief ecological innovation officer of Yishi Technology, Tan Zhangxi, founder of OURS, Zhang Tianlei, founder and CEO of Mainline Technology, Yang Ming, co-founder of Qingfei Intelligence, Wang Qicheng, co-founder of MINIEYE, Zhu Lei, founder and CEO of Mushroom Car Union, and other Tsinghua scholars are also exerting their wisdom and talents in the field of automatic driving, promoting the automotive industry to continue to move forward in the direction of intelligence.

The profound understanding and thorough understanding of the "Tsinghua Gang" for autonomous driving will greatly guide the development direction of this field. Behind these technology masters, there are more Tsinghua people rushing to the wilderness of autonomous driving.