Huawei announced the new intelligent driving assistance system HUAWEI ADS, which is based on the multi-camera fusion solution and completely abandons LiDAR. This important decision has attracted wide attention and discussion in the industry.
Compared with the autonomous driving solution represented by Tesla, Huawei has chosen a completely different technical route. Tesla has long emphasized the importance of LiDAR in achieving high-level autonomous driving, but Huawei has gone the opposite way, using advanced algorithms and powerful computing power to achieve Level 3 autonomous driving assistance that relies only on visual perception.
It is understood that the HUAWEI ADS intelligent driving assistance system includes three forward-facing automotive-grade cameras, 10 side-facing ultrasonic radars, and 12 ultra-close-range cameras. By working together, ADS enables all-round, high-precision environmental awareness and object detection.
In complex urban road scenarios, ADS performs well. According to Huawei's official data, in complex urban road conditions, the ADS function coverage rate as a driving assistance reaches 99.5%, and the pass rate is as high as 96%, with zero accidents and zero intervention.
In contrast, Tesla, which is equipped with lidar, has a functional coverage rate of only 79% in similar scenarios, a pass rate of 68.75%, and has had 14 accidents. It can be seen that even without lidar, the perception ability of ADS is not inferior to Tesla.
Huawei claims that thanks to its all-round visual pressure sensing technology, ADS is better able to cope with the effects of bad weather and strong sunlight, and has stronger long-distance object detection and tracking capabilities. Tesla's lidar is relatively limited in these scenarios.
What's more worth mentioning is that Huawei's intelligent cockpit is also equipped with an industry-leading 192-line lidar, with an ultra-long-range detection capability of 250 meters, which is 20% higher than the industry average. Although Huawei claims to completely abandon LiDAR, this top-of-the-line LiDAR is undoubtedly a powerful supplement to ADS perception capabilities.
In addition to the improvement of perception capabilities, ADS also strengthens active safety protection capabilities. ADS Forward AEB (Automatic Emergency Braking) has an effective range of 4-150 km/h and an emergency braking speed of up to 120 km/h, while the safety range for lateral and rear has been significantly increased from 40-120 km/h to 40-130 km/h, and special road conditions such as stagnant potholes can be accurately identified.
Unfortunately, powerful ADS can only be used in nationwide expressway and urban expressway NCA (autonomous driving closed area) test scenarios. There is still a long way to go before true high-level autonomous driving can be achieved. However, Huawei's decision to abandon LiDAR and fully switch to vision solutions has undoubtedly provided new ideas for the industry.
At present, intelligent cockpit and assisted driving have become the standard configuration of intelligent cars. With the continuous decline in the cost of vision solutions, multi-eye cameras have become a new trend to help the development of autonomous driving. Following Huawei, Xpeng Motors also released a new intelligent driving assistance system, X-PILOT, which also adopts a pure vision solution and claims to be able to achieve assisted driving on urban roads.
The rise of Chinese brands in the field of autonomous driving technology gives us hope for "changing lanes and overtaking". It is believed that in the near future, unmanned driving will no longer be a dream, but a daily life in which we live. In this transformation, Chinese brands are expected to rely on their technology accumulation in key fields such as algorithms and chips to achieve corner overtaking and lead the development of the global smart car industry.