Recently, Baidu Maps announced that it has achieved a milestone breakthrough in urban lane-level navigation, and has taken the lead in covering ordinary roads in more than 100 cities across the country. With the support of the self-developed "Beidou High Precision" technology and the acceleration of the Wenxin traffic model, the latest version of the Baidu Maps app can provide "true" lane recommendation services for all urban road scenarios, maximizing user driving safety and traffic efficiency.
When driving on urban roads, users are often faced with many scenarios such as continuous intersections, bus lanes, diverging roads, and complex tunnels where lanes are temporarily widened or narrowed.
With the technical support of the large model, Baidu Maps has realized an all-round upgrade of lane-level navigation from the directions of lane guidance, tunnel navigation, and accident warning. In terms of lane guidance, the upgraded urban lane-level navigation can accurately recommend lanes for users, and make the suggested lanes more intuitive and clear by highlighting them. For example, in a multi-fork intersection scenario such as Guangzhou Avenue (below) in Guangzhou, lane-level navigation not only highlights and accurately guides the lanes for users, but also adds a striking red "X" for non-recommended lanes, helping users make correct decisions to change lanes in advance and avoid driving risks caused by "hesitation".
In terms of tunnel navigation, the upgrade introduces an immersive panel and a comprehensive "progress bar" to help users better understand the real-time location and predict the remaining distance of the tunnel. In addition, a more timely and accurate "lane accident warning" can not only broadcast the lane where the accident occurred in advance, give lane change and avoidance suggestions, but also allow users to click to view the real pictures and information of the accident road section ahead, make decisions in advance, and improve driving safety.
The upgraded Baidu map has achieved 100% experiential "true recommendation" and "true experience" lane-level navigation in more than 100 cities across the country, effectively reducing invalid lane changes by dynamically recommending the optimal lane throughout the process, achieving "true safety" while greatly improving traffic efficiency.
Baidu Map's lane-level navigation can achieve milestone upgrades and quickly land in 100 cities, thanks to its long-term accumulation of underlying data advantages in the field of maps. The LD lane-level data used by Baidu Maps has higher accuracy, breaking through the technical limitations of the previous SD standard navigation data in the industry, and laying a solid data foundation for achieving "accurate lane recommendation" that is higher than the industry standard. In addition, based on high-precision lane-level topology data, Baidu Maps can clearly present the lane connection relationship between each road section and recommend a smoother lane driving path.
Taking Tianhe North Road in Guangzhou as an example, when the driving route includes multiple intersections in a row, when the first intersection is about to be reached, the user can see the recommended lane for the next road section or even after the left turn in advance, predict the best driving route, and achieve the least number of lane changes and lower difficulty driving, so as to "have the road in the eye and know in the heart", which greatly improves the traffic efficiency and driving safety sense.
Due to the high requirements for positional accuracy and the huge amount of data processing for lane-level navigation, it cannot be completed by traditional manual mapping methods alone. Based on the Wenxin large model technology base, Baidu Maps has created the industry's first map generation large model, which has become a key breakthrough in realizing the large-scale implementation of lane-level navigation technology. The new paradigm of end-to-end lane network built by large models solves traditional industry problems, significantly improves the whole process of map production technology, reduces the cost of map mapping by 95%, and finally realizes the excellent ability of end-to-end map generation with high precision and high recall. In particular, it is manifested in the improvement of the automation level of lane-level map data production, which effectively solves the industry problems such as high manual dependence, low data production efficiency, high cost, and poor scene generalization ability of the traditional mode, and realizes the large-scale mass production capacity of lane-level maps.
Eighteen years of ingenuity and cohesion, Baidu Maps has been committed to providing users with an efficient, convenient and safe travel experience. The completion of the "100 Cities Plan" of lane-level navigation is not the end, but a new starting point. It is reported that Baidu Maps will achieve nationwide coverage of lane-level navigation in real cities in 2024, accompanying users to "take the right path" and travel more efficiently and safely.