In 2022, the commercial operation of autonomous driving will continue to accelerate.
At the beginning of the year, the media reported that Shanghai would formulate an action plan for the development of the intelligent and connected car terminal industry to support the legislation of driving without safety officers in Pudong.
Three months later, Beijing issued a notice of unmanned manned demonstration application, and Baidu and Xiaoma Zhixing became the first batch of approved enterprises. After that, the autonomous vehicles of the two companies will be able to carry out unmanned Robotaxi in the core area of 60 square kilometers of Beijing's Yizhuang Economic Development Zone, which means that the "unmanned behind the wheel" autonomous driving service will be liberalized for the first time in China's megacities.
This time, Baidu carried out unmanned manned demonstration applications according to requirements, and the first batch will invest 10 unmanned vehicles, and the follow-up plan will increase 30 unmanned vehicles.
"This is a milestone event, a qualitative change." Wei Dong, vice president and chief safety operation officer of Baidu's intelligent driving business group, told the Titanium Media APP.
Where is the manifestation of qualitative change?
Wei Dong said that in the past, the safety officer in the driver's seat was like a sparring partner, and when the robot encountered a problem that was not good at solving, the safety officer could take over at any time to intervene. Now moving the safety officer from the driver's seat to the co-pilot means completely handing over the driving intervention ability to the machine itself. From a technical point of view, this is no longer absolutely different from fully unmanned driving, just a matter of time rhythm. From the perspective of commercialization, this is also the key policy point for the industry to operate unmanned.
Complete depersonalization will likely be achieved by the end of the year or early next year
From the perspective of long-term marketization, when to achieve large-scale commercialization is still the most concerned issue in the industry. This requires multiple prerequisites: a sufficient range, a low enough cost, and the ability of the technology to support unmanned.
At present, most of the autonomous driving service vehicles still have safety officers, which means that the cost structure of bicycles is "car + safety officer".
Last year, Baidu released the Apollo Moon5 generation car and announced the full cost of the car + suite of 480,000 yuan, according to the 5-year depreciation apportionment, the cost of one month is 8,000 yuan. "Now all security personnel are actually security costs, and the proportion of the entire cost structure is still relatively high." Xu Baoqiang, director of Baidu's automotive robot department, said.
Beijing issued a notice of unmanned manned demonstration application, which means that the industry has the opportunity to remove the cost of drivers, after all, only unmanned can achieve subversive changes in the cost structure.
Although the safety officer has not been completely removed at present, Kong Lei, deputy director of the Management Committee of the Beijing Economic Development Zone and director of the Beijing High-level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone Work Office, also said at the press conference that the pilot zone has launched the final stage of the unmanned policy research work, that is, the research on the manned demonstration policy without safety personnel in the car, and in the future, it will realize that there is no one in the car through remote driving by the safety officer, and continue to support enterprises to carry out unmanned technology iteration and business model innovation.
Wei Dong was quite optimistic about when he would be able to achieve full unmanned manpower. In his view, at the end of this year or early next year, there will be an opportunity to achieve full unmanned manned, in 2024-2025 or so, due to the relevant national supporting management measures, laws and regulations should be able to have some implementation conditions, the industry will usher in a round of relatively peak release period.
For when to make a profit, Wei Dong also gave a clear time point, "In the next 2-3 years or so, we believe that there is an opportunity to achieve unmanned commercial profitability at a single point." ”
Is it really unmanned, safe?
The first nature of autonomous driving is always safety.
Whether the safety officer is now moved to the co-pilot or the future of the real driverless, how to ensure safety is the premise of whether it can be promoted on a large scale.
Before issuing the notice of unmanned manned demonstration application, in terms of mileage, order acceptance, safe operation requirements, user prompts, mobile application APP, etc., the Economic Development Zone has made clear access requirements for applicant subjects, test vehicles, and safety personnel. For example, when an enterprise has a safety officer in the main driver's seat, the number of orders received should not be less than 20,000 times.
Xu Baoqiang also said, "A few years ago, we took Beijing's T3 and T4 license plates, just like the second subject, more is the investigation of the driving ability of the venue. This unmanned examination is similar to subject three, which will make a comprehensive investigation of the ability of the entire cloud, including the examination of early warning and vehicle control capabilities, and will also look at the situation and effect of the entire test stage, and will continue to look at the performance of vehicles on the road. ”
To this end, Baidu has set up a three-layer security system: the main system security design, safety monitoring and security redundancy system, and 5G cloud driving.
The safety design of the main system is composed of several different subsystems, the first subsystem is a fully self-developed real-time vehicle-based basic OS; the second subsystem is a pan-sensing system containing maps, positioning and environmental perception; the third subsystem is a decision-making planning system that determines the driving behavior of the vehicle; and the fourth subsystem is a vehicle-road collaboration system, which is an effective supplement to bicycle intelligence.
Safety monitoring and safety redundancy system is according to the safety level corresponding to different risks, and will achieve safe control of vehicles through slow braking, parking, roadside parking, etc., to avoid collision risks.
The cloud driving is combined with the 5G infrastructure, the car end video is transmitted back to the cloud in real time, and the vehicle driving environment is reconstructed in the remote driving compartment, so that the cloud safety officer can also understand the driving situation and environmental situation of the vehicle as in the real car, and send the car control instructions to the car in real time when they intervene.
epilogue
Although Robotaxi has many hills to climb between large-scale operations, the boots have landed, and the rest is only a matter of speed and slowness.
As Wei Dong said, in the first half of this year, Beijing has begun such a demonstration, which also represents the attitude of the state to this industry, and the policies introduced by Beijing are more focused on not being suitable for Yizhuang, but on the reference value of this industry and the value that can be copied on a large scale, thus helping China's industrial unmanned how to push forward a substantial step forward.
Robotaxi, who is really uninhabited, believes that in the near future, we can all experience it. (This article was first published on Titanium Media App, author/Han Jingxian, editor/Zhang Min)