Recently, Horizon SuperDrive™ (HSD™), a full-scene intelligent driving solution for Horizon Robotics, has ushered in a number of on-site experiences, which can achieve an anthropomorphic experience like an old driver during the peak commuting hours in different cities, with super traffic efficiency and elegant and calm attitude, and the overall performance of the system has won wide recognition from customers and industry professionals at home and abroad, and the product performance is considered to be "comparable to the first echelon of the industry". On August 28, Horizon held an open day for high-end intelligent driving technology in Beijing, sharing the latest product progress and behind the brilliant performance of HSD, Horizon Robotics has a product methodology and trend thinking on the high-end intelligent driving market.
Dr. Yu Kai, founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics, said at the event: "We should do intelligent driving with product thinking, take people as the starting point, and pay attention to users' experience and feelings about products. Horizon SuperDrive takes elegance and calmness as its product goal to create a benchmark for high-end intelligent driving systems around the world. ”
Dr. Kai Yu, Founder and CEO of Horizon
The morning and evening peaks of many cities performed amazingly, and HSD was on par with the first echelon of the industry
At present, the competition for high-end intelligent driving is intensifying, but the experience of NOA products in urban areas on the market is not yet "easy to use". In 2024, car companies will shift from simply competing for the number of NOAs in urban areas to competing for user experience. At the same time, Tesla's FSD, which is regarded as one of the industry vanes, was revealed to be entering China as soon as the end of 2024, which will accelerate the opening of a new market competition pattern. Horizon believes that in 2025, urban NOA will enter a competitive window period that truly crosses the chasm.
Based on the product concept of "people-oriented", Horizon HSD has been committed to providing anthropomorphic driving behavior and traffic efficiency from the research and development stage. Although HSD has only been in development for 9 months, its recent on-road experience has shown a mature "veteran driver" temperament.
Horizon HSD Highlights Scene Performance (1)
In the face of multiple complex challenges such as the city's Friday evening rush hour and heavy rain, Horizon HSD has achieved a smooth experience without taking over the whole process and "old driver". At the diversion intersection of the construction area with large area occlusion and large aspect ratio, the system accurately executes the unprotected left turn into the target lane, demonstrating strong perception and diagram-free reasoning ability. In the urban roundabout, which is a problem for the whole industry, HSD is stress-free and silky through the multi-entrance and exit roundabouts interspersed with parachute pedestrians, all over the temporary parking and waterlogged lane lines, showing a strong passing ability and performing on a par with the first echelon of the industry.
Horizon HSD Highlights Scene Performance (2)
Different cities will pose multiple challenges to the intelligent driving system due to their significant differences in road layout, traffic flow, and climatic conditions. In the complex and random urban traffic environment, typical urban scenarios such as misaligned intersections, unprotected two-lane left turns, narrow curves, and continuous cyclists have brought great challenges to high-level intelligent driving. In the face of the dislocation intersection in the construction area, HSD accurately identifies the diversion information and accurately navigates to the target lane with strong perception and graphless reasoning technology. In addition to the more anthropomorphic ultimate intelligent driving experience, HSD's performance at the SR (real-time environment rendering) and HMI (human-computer interaction) levels is also remarkable. With the world model as the core, the new HMI evolution brings users a richer sense of the world in high-dimensional space, making the interaction more natural, smoother, more comfortable, and at the same time having a cool sense of technology.
Visualization can present the thoughts and thoughts of the intelligent driving system, giving users enough confidence. The real-time perception of Horizon HSD renders the physical world in real time, builds a digital mirror of the world in the HMI, and reconstructs the physical world more accurately, leading the next generation of SR benchmarks. When experiencing HSD, Volkswagen Group China's Chairman and CEO Richard Braid said, "This car is perceiving the real world in the right way, and I can see all the details very accurately."
According to the plan, Horizon HSD will launch the standard version of the mass production scheme in the fourth quarter of 2024, and will achieve the delivery of the first mass production cooperation model in the third quarter of 2025. After many "experiences", HSD will continue to evolve and accelerate towards mass production and delivery in a more mature state.
Technology + engineering + products, outperform the "triathlon" of high-level intelligent driving
The core of the "easy-to-use" intelligent driving system is a technical planning and development strategy based on deep user insights. In the process of high-end intelligent driving product research and development, Horizon Robotics has built a "three-in-one" capability model: industry-leading technical strength, tempered engineering capabilities, and people-oriented product system. Through the in-depth integration of the three capabilities, Horizon Robotics can take into account the performance height and landing reliability of high-end intelligent driving products, and provide the best solution for users and the market.
In order to achieve user-friendly and user-friendly use, high-end intelligent driving also needs to solve the two major problems of performance improvement (Scale Up) and scene generalization (Scale Out) at the same time. At present, even the industry's leading intelligent driving companies are difficult to achieve one of these points to the extreme, and at the same time, they are facing huge challenges. Through the application of leading end-to-end World Model and interactive game algorithms, Horizon has successfully broken the common "seesaw effect" in technology iteration, and at the same time broke through the problems of performance improvement and scene generalization, creating an anthropomorphic product experience at every moment and every journey.
The core evolution of autonomous driving technology is essentially the in-depth excavation and improvement of machine cognition and interaction capabilities. By building an end-to-end world model for mass production, Horizon enables the HSD system to understand everything and have universal cognition. This means that the vehicle will act like an experienced "Intelligent Driver", able to fully perceive and understand the world around it and make more informed decisions. At the same time, with data-driven interactive games as the core and safer rule boundaries, Horizon HSD can bring users an elegant and calm ultimate intelligent driving experience in complex urban scenarios such as congestion and lane changes, intersections, and mixed traffic of people and vehicles.
The winner or loser of the high-end intelligent driving competition lies in the mass production capacity of the combination of software and hardware. On the basis of easy-to-use software solutions, top-level urban NOA products also need the support of next-generation computing solutions. Horizon Robotics has launched the Journey ®6 series, the only computing solution in China that meets the mass production needs of full-level intelligent driving, and uses the Journey 6 flagship version, which is specially designed for a new generation of high-end intelligent driving in urban areas, with HSD to create a high-end intelligent driving model room with software and hardware synergy and ultimate efficiency, which can not only promote the acceleration of mass production and popularization of easy-to-use urban NOA products, but also improve the efficiency of industrial R&D and delivery through the flexible opening of full-stack technical capabilities.
At present, a number of software and hardware ecosystem partners have officially launched intelligent driving solutions based on the Journey 6 series. The first batch of algorithm partners, such as Qingzhou Intelligent Aviation, Jianzhi Robot and Yihang Intelligence, completed the migration and deployment of perception algorithms in only 3 days, and completed the high-speed NOA solution on board within 15 days, greatly improving the overall efficiency. Based on the Journey 6 series, the software development efficiency continues to lead, and in the future, the Horizon HSD superimposed Journey 6 flagship version will run a greater "acceleration" of mass production.
According to the latest data from the Gaogong Automobile Research Institute, in the first half of 2024, Horizon ranked first in the market share of self-owned brand passenger car forward-view all-in-one and intelligent driving computing solutions in the Chinese market, and continued to lead the market of low-to-high full-level intelligent driving computing solutions. At the same time, Horizon recently announced that the cumulative shipments of the Journey family products have reached a new high, exceeding 6 million sets.
Behind the leading market share and shipments, Horizon has built a mature mass production engineering system, which can not only promote the iterative optimization of forward-looking software algorithms and computing solutions, but also greatly improve the efficiency of product application, providing a solid guarantee for leading the high-end intelligent driving market.
With the continuous iteration of technology and the expansion of mass production, Horizon's triathlon system of "technology + product + engineering" will form a strong positive cycle, greatly accelerate the application process of intelligent driving technology, and open a new chapter of beautiful intelligent travel for more users.