AsiaIndustrial NetNews: At present, global corporate giants regard artificial intelligence as the next industrial outlet, and driverless cars are highly expected. According to McKinsey’s forecast, driverless cars can generate an output value of 200 billion to 1.9 trillion US dollars by 2025.
On the 19th, Baidu announced the “Apollo (Apollo) Program”, which will provide an open, complete and secure software platform to partners in the automotive industry and autonomous driving fields to help them combine vehicles and hardware systems to quickly build a set of their own. complete autonomous driving system.
Lu Qi, president and chief operating officer of Baidu Group, said that artificial intelligence technology has huge potential in promoting social development, and smart cars are one of the biggest industrial opportunities. It is reported that Baidu is also the first unmanned vehicle technology company in the world to announce the opening of its own technology and platform.
The threshold for unmanned vehicle research and development may be further lowered
It is understood that the structure of Baidu’s “Apollo” platform includes a complete set of software, hardware and service systems, including four major parts: vehicle platform, hardware platform, software platform, and cloud data services.
It is reported that in the future, Baidu will open up the code or capabilities of functions such as environment perception, path planning, vehicle control, and in-vehicle operating system, and provide complete development and testing tools. At the same time, Baidu will also select partners with the best degree of collaboration and compatibility in the fields of vehicles and sensors, and jointly form a collaborative alliance, which will be recommended to project participants to further reduce the research and development threshold for unmanned vehicles and promote the rapid popularization of technology.
“By opening up its technological achievements, it can be quickly applied in related fields, and it can promote the rapid iteration of the technology itself.” Baidu said that Baidu has opened its mature and safe autonomous driving technology to the industry, which is conducive to the establishment of a An ecosystem centered on cooperation, leveraging Baidu’s technological advantages in the field of artificial intelligence, empowering partners, and jointly promoting the development and popularization of autonomous driving technology.
Lu Qi said, “As the world’s largest automobile production and sales market, China has many automobile brands, and the cooperation environment is more open. Baidu’s initiative to open up its autonomous driving technology this time will create a lot of innovation opportunities with the automobile industry, and it will be more widely used. Unleash the value accumulated by our technology and drive rapid changes in the industry. Looking at the United States and other markets where the auto industry is relatively developed, the open and innovative industry ecology advocated by Baidu will also play a role in promoting the accelerated development of autonomous driving.”
What’s next for the “Apollo” program? According to Baidu, by July 2017, the autonomous driving capability of closed sites will be opened; by the end of 2017, the autonomous driving capability under simple urban road conditions will be output; by 2020, it will be gradually opened to highways and ordinary urban roads. Fully autonomous driving. According to Baidu, more detailed plans will be gradually announced in the follow-up.
Regarding the unmanned vehicle technology platform opened by Baidu, Li Bin, founder and chairman of NIO, a high-end electric vehicle manufacturer in China, said that in the future, the value chain of the automotive industry may be reshaped, and personalized experience will define the car. direction of future development.
Commercialization of driverless cars accelerates
At present, major giants regard artificial intelligence as the next industrial outlet. Among them, driverless cars have high hopes.
According to McKinsey’s forecast, by 2025, driverless cars can generate an output value of 200 billion to 1.9 trillion US dollars. According to a report by IHS Research, another global analyst firm, the global self-driving mass-produced car will hit the market in 2025, with an estimated sales of 230,000 units. By 2035, annual sales of driverless cars will reach 11.8 million units, or about 10% of total sales. In 2035, the market share of driverless cars in North America can reach 29%, the market share of driverless cars in China is 24%, and the market share in Europe is 20%.
In the field of autonomous driving, technology companies including Google, Tesla, Uber, Baidu, etc. are all making efforts, while traditional car companies such as Volkswagen and Toyota are also actively investing. A competitive battle is trying to dominate the driverless car market. staged. The industry believes that the commercialization of unmanned driving is expected to accelerate as technology giants scramble to deploy the field of unmanned driving.
Among them, Google is the earliest pioneer. It has launched the self-driving car project as early as 2009, and its test fleet has been driving on the highways of 4 states in the United States. In December 2016, Google spun off its self-driving car project into an independent company, Waymo. “We’ve driven more than two million miles autonomously, mostly on city streets,” reads the official Waymo website.
Currently, Google is facing challenges from ride-hailing app Uber, Apple Inc. and traditional automakers. Especially after the strong entry of Uber, the competition in the field of autonomous driving has become more and more fierce. Uber began testing its self-driving cars on public roads in 2016, the same year it acquired a self-driving startup, Otto, for $680 million. In February, Waymo filed a lawsuit alleging that a former Google engineer stole self-driving car secrets and left for Otto. The legal battle, which has also become the first major intellectual property battle in the self-driving car era, is currently in the litigation phase.
In addition, both Tesla and Apple are actively deploying autonomous driving. Compared with Apple’s secret autonomous driving project, Tesla is much more high-profile. However, the pace of its development has slowed down after a fatal accident involving a self-driving system in a Tesla electric car in 2016.
In China’s autonomous driving market, Baidu has the earliest layout, and both R&D and commercial use are at the forefront. Baidu’s driverless car project started in 2013 and is led by Baidu Research Institute. Its core technology is “Baidu Automotive Brain”, which includes four modules: high-precision map, positioning, perception, intelligent decision-making and control. At the end of 2015, Baidu’s unmanned vehicles realized fully automatic driving under mixed road conditions of urban roads, ring roads and expressways.
Recently, Baidu also invested in Weilai, with an investment amount of more than 100 million US dollars. Baidu had previously cooperated with BMW, but in 2016, Baidu canceled a plan to cooperate with it to design a self-driving prototype. Not long ago, NIO released its first self-driving concept car in the United States. Next, NIO plans to release the first mass-produced vehicle equipped with the latest driverless technology in China.
■Connection
Chen Anning, General Manager of Chery Co., Ltd.:
The cooperation between car companies and Internet companies is getting better
Chen Anning, general manager of Chery Co., Ltd., said that the threshold for research and development of autonomous driving technology is high, and it is not a day’s work to go from 0 to 1. Therefore, the opening of Baidu’s autonomous driving platform is of great significance to the automotive industry. Chery welcomes Baidu’s move. At the same time, it must also be recognized that the cooperation between car companies and Internet technology companies in autonomous driving has a process of getting better and better. The field of intelligent driving has established the competitive advantages of car companies. At present, our cooperation with Baidu in the field of autonomous driving has entered the stage of deep customization.
Industry insiders believe that Baidu’s announcement to share autonomous driving technology with the industry is obviously good news for many car companies that are in urgent need of transformation. The threshold for research and development of autonomous driving technology is high, and the realization of the technical path from automatic assisted driving to fully autonomous driving requires a large amount of long-term capital and human investment. Baidu adopts an open strategy to jointly promote technology development and popularization with partners in a wide range of fields, which will also lay a solid foundation for itself to maintain its leading position in the industry and play an important role in the future automotive industry.
The Links: 3HAC026253-001 3HAC10828-15
