On April 28, Beijing issued the "Implementation Rules for the Management of Unmanned Road Testing and Demonstration Applications for Passenger Vehicles in the Beijing Intelligent and Connected Vehicle Policy Pilot Zone", and at the same time issued the first batch of unmanned manned demonstration application licenses in China to Baidu, and its autonomous driving service platform "Radish Run" also officially opened the main driving unmanned autonomous driving travel service.
Simply put, the automatic driving service of "no one in the main driving position" is online, and you can enjoy the travel services provided by the main driving vehicle without safety officer by placing an order through the Radish Run App. In the early stage, there are fewer vehicles, and the platform dispatch adopts the mixed mode of main driving vehicles with/without safety officers, and more operating vehicles will join it in the later stage with the liberalization of policies and the accumulation of operational data. What is the experience of driverless vehicles?
The ordering process of the Radish Run App is almost the same as that of other online ride-hailing applications, and the difference at this stage is that your starting position and end point need to be preset stations, and the convenience will be further improved in the future with the increase of stations, technical iterations and policy liberalization.
After selecting the starting location and the end point and placing the order, the platform will dispatch the order, and after the receiving vehicle arrives at the station, we only need to enter the last 4 digits of the mobile phone number or scan the code with the App to unlock the door (different models have different unlocking methods).
The rear of the vehicle is equipped with two touch screens, and the default display of real-time traffic information can also be switched to navigation maps, multimedia, air conditioning, volume and other interfaces.
After getting on the car and wearing a seat belt and clicking to start the trip, the vehicle leaves, you can see the real-time road condition information through the screen, and the traffic participants such as vehicles and pedestrians will be recognized by sensors such as radar and cameras, and the road markings are not a problem. After a lap of experience, the overall performance of the vehicle is remarkable.
When the road conditions are good, the vehicle will remain in the middle of the lane; when the vehicle in front slows down/stops/starts, it will also slow down/stop/start, but it may be for safety considerations, the delicacy of the vehicle braking has room for improvement, with the accumulation of data, the optimization of logic should be more delicate and comfortable. In addition, when entering the intersection, the vehicle will drive into the lane to be taken in advance according to the navigation information, accurate and decisive, as if an old driver is driving.
When the lane in front of it becomes narrower, the vehicle will hit the turn signal and line in advance, and it can also cope with the situation that the vehicle in front of it brakes and turns left after the parallel line like the above picture.
When it is detected that the "unstable factors" of the road (such as non-motorized vehicles, U-turns, etc.) may pose a potential threat to their own driving safety, the vehicle will honk its horn at the right time to alert other road participants.
The control of the steering wheel of the system can be described as smooth, when turning the turn signal + turning the steering wheel in one go and the main driving position is not yet a driver, in the back row to witness all this you may fall into meditation, the future is coming?!
Although the experience distance is not very long, this self-driving vehicle with no one will still impress you. Radar, cameras and other sensors recognize accurately, steering lanes smoothly, and can also honk the horn to remind other traffic participants according to demand, which is a bit of a mature driver's feeling.
After the technology is more mature and laws and regulations allow it may bring a certain impact to the online car industry (of course, it will not be in the short term), at least the situation of slow driving in the fast lane will not happen...
Two questions and answers about Baidu Apollo driverless
Why does the co-pilot have a safety officer?
This is a policy stipulation that the co-pilot of the vehicle for unmanned autonomous driving travel services must have a safety officer. With the liberalization of the policy in the future, the car safety officer will be gradually abolished.
How to ensure the driving safety and passenger safety of driverless vehicles?
Baidu Apollo ensures passenger travel and ride experience through bicycle intelligence, monitoring redundancy, parallel driving three-layer safety system and travel service system. In addition, Baidu's autonomous driving kits are all self-developed and are all Chinese brand products in terms of model selection, thus ensuring data security.
Bicycle intelligence: that is, the main system safety design, which is composed of several subsystems. The first is a fully self-developed real-time vehicle-based basic OS; the second is a pan-perception system containing maps, positioning, and environmental perception; the third is a decision-making planning system that determines the driving behavior of vehicles; and the fourth is a vehicle-road collaboration system, which serves as an effective supplement to bicycle intelligence.
Surveillance Redundancy: Safety monitoring and safety redundancy system. The system can detect and maintain the vehicle in a safe state in time when there is a safety hazard in the hardware and software of the vehicle itself or the scene in which the vehicle is located. Based on fully redundant autonomous driving hardware, combined with the monitoring system, a sound risk reduction strategy can be realized. Specifically, according to the safety level corresponding to different risks, the vehicle will be safely controlled by slow braking, parking, roadside parking, etc., to avoid collision risks.
Parallel driving: that is, 5G cloud driving, which combines China's unique 5G infrastructure construction advantages, the car end video is transmitted back to the cloud in real time, and the vehicle driving environment is reconstructed in the remote cockpit, so that the cloud safety officer can also understand the driving and environmental situation of the vehicle as on the real car, and send the car control instructions to the car in real time when intervening, so as to achieve remote real-time control of the car.
Up to now, Baidu Apollo's test fleet has reached 500 vehicles, open road testing in nearly 30 cities around the world, and the test mileage has exceeded 25 million kilometers. Massive test data and thousands of autonomous driving patents provide strong technical support for the driving safety of driverless vehicles.
epilogue
In the field of autonomous driving, China is in a global leading position. Policy support and guidance, diversified road test environment and rich networked and intelligent new energy vehicle carriers have all played a positive role in promoting the development of China's autonomous driving industry. Baidu Apollo is the leader of China's autonomous driving enterprises, and Xiaoma Zhixing is also a force that cannot be ignored. After all, the curtain of the era of automatic driving has slowly opened, and the models worth driving in the future must be full of driving fun!