In autonomous and self-driving vehicle news are Beep, Baidu, BYD, Luminar and Hesai.
Beep Partners with Contra Costa Transport Authority
Beep Inc., a provider of autonomous shared mobility solutions, announced a partnership with the Contra Costa Transportation Authority (CCTA). The partnership marks Beep’s first West Coast deployment, located at Bishop Ranch in the city of San Ramon, the largest mixed-use business community in Northern California. In 2018, CCTA was the first agency in California to obtain permission by the California Department of Motor Vehicles for a shared autonomous vehicle to travel on public roads in the state.
This program provides employees, visitors and residents of Bishop Ranch an opportunity to experience autonomous mobility in Beep’s autonomous and electric shuttles. The four-stop route will provide connectivity to the San Ramon Transit Center, City Center and various corporate offices.
Beep and CCTA will partner on delivering autonomous mobility at an additional site early next year. Both projects will provide CCTA with valuable insight in developing services with autonomous vehicles that will soon underpin dynamic mobility networks in campuses, communities and city centers throughout the county.
Baidu Intros New Smart Driving Apps & Apollo White Paper
Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU and HKEX: 9888) (“Baidu” or the “Company”), a leading AI company with strong internet foundations, today an automotive intelligence conference on the eve of Auto Shanghai 2023. During the conference, Baidu released a series of new products covering intelligent driving, intelligent cabin, and intelligent maps. Additionally, Baidu introduced four new key-capabilities for car manufacturers in the newly released “Baidu Apollo Self Driving Openness White Paper “.
At the conference, Rob Chu, Baidu Corporate Vice President and GM of Apollo Self Driving, and Shan Jizhang, Founder and CEO of Black Sesame Semiconductor announced that Black Sesame Semiconductor will become the latest chip partner to Baidu Apollo Smart Driving. Additionally, Apollo Highway Driving Pro will be deployed on the Black Sesame’s Huashan II A1000 chip computing platform, which will be officially released in Q3 this year. This partnership marks a deeper collaboration between Chinese smart driving solutions and Chinese smart chipsets, which will further accelerate the smart manufacturing of China’s automotive industry.
The automobile industry is now in a moment of radical change. Baidu predicts that by 2026, the market penetration rate of models equipped with the L2+ advanced intelligent driving solution, valet parking highway navigation pilot and city navigation pilot will exceed 15%, ushering in a transition period in intelligent vehicle industry.
“In 2026, when intelligent cars become more prevalent, new customers will be less likely to consider cars without intelligent driving capabilities,” said Zhenyu Li, Senior Corporate Vice President of Baidu and president of the Intelligent Driving Business Group. Rob Chu, Baidu Corporate Vice President and GM of Apollo Self Driving explained, “Whoever can take the lead in providing consumers with a safe and secure intelligent driving experience will likely have a head start in the second half of the intelligent car competition.”
Upgraded intelligent driving solutions to help car makers build smarter cars
Baidu Apollo launched its flagship intelligent driving solution, Apollo City Driving Max, which is equipped with dual Nvidia Orin X with 508 TOPS arithmetic power. This is the only solution in China that offers users a coherent experience on urban roads using pure vision perception. The current product definition also includes LIDAR to achieve “pure vision + LIDAR” true perception redundancy. The product uses a “lightweight high HD map” that is nearly 80% “lighter” than the traditional HD maps, enabling rapid urban generalization at a more reasonable cost.
Baidu’s integrated auto-navigation plus valet parking solution Apollo Highway Driving Pro has also completed an algorithm platform upgrade. With the latest single TDA4-VH platform, the AI and CPU computing power usage is 50% less compared to the previous TDA4-VH platform. It is expected to enable more intelligent driving and parking functionality at lower computing power and lower cost. Baidu Apollo and Voyah, an EV manufacturer backed by DONGFENG Motor, also announced the Voyah FREE, an all-electric and plug-in-hybrid 5-seater SUV, will be equipped with Apollo Highway Driving Pro, which includes assisted driving functions such as highway navigation pilot, city autopilot and efficient parking in all scenarios.
In addition, Baidu Apollo also upgraded its autonomous parking solution Apollo Parking, which has a success rate of over 99% in the top 5 most commonly faced parking scenarios and takes only 28 seconds to complete perpendicular parking, drastically reducing the difficulty of parking for novice drivers.
Baidu Apollo currently provides two flagship Intelligent Cabin solutions: the DuerOS for Apollo and Duer assistant for Apollo. The DuerOS can be quickly installed for mass production as a whole package solution; while the Duer assistant, based on the big model localization, is able to achieve full-time full-duplex100 millisecond-level response, through which car companies can define and realize a leading intelligent cabin experience. At the same time, ERNIE Bot – a large language model which Baidu had previously introduced – has been opened up for invitational testing. Baidu is actively exploring the use of ERNIE Big Model’s capabilities to reshape the relationship between the user and the smart cabin when traveling, and to create new experiences for the AI smart cabin.
In terms of smart maps, Baidu Apollo has upgraded its in-vehicle navigation maps with different levels of quality, performance and real-time data. The newly released shared autonomy maps provide a new human-vehicle interface and enhance users’ trust in smart driving solutions. Simultaneously, Baidu’s HD maps have been upgraded to OneMap, which can quickly update map data in real time.
Baidu has creatively integrated agile development with the traditional V-model followed by ASPICE® and passed the organization-level assessment certification of ASPICE® CL3, becoming the first Tier-1 solution provider in the industry to achieve a deep integration of the two and be certified by an authoritative body. This signifies that Baidu has the industry’s leading project delivery process management organization and is able to deliver high quality products and services to OEMs consistently.
Baidu Apollo’s intelligent solutions for automobiles have been mass-produced on 134 models from 31 car brands, with a cumulative total of over 7 million vehicles, leading in the Tier-1 sector.
Opening up four key capabilities to accelerate the building of a new car-manufacturing supply chain in the intelligent car era
The smart car era requires not only an upgrade of intelligent products but is also challenging the established relationship model between traditional vehicles and suppliers. This is a completely new industrial revolution for both technology companies and car companies. Compared to traditional systems based on mechanical parts, intelligent systems are hardware-based, algorithm software-driven, large-scale dynamic systems that are growing exponentially in complexity.
Baidu Apollo released the “Baidu Apollo Self Driving Openness White Paper“, announcing four key capabilities: open experience definition, open independent experience evolution, open full-cycle OTA services, and open co-create with car manufacturing partners. Baidu’s goal is to help car manufacturing partners to achieve a leading position and commercial success in intelligent driving, while ensuring quality end-user experiences.
The four open capabilities can be summarized as:
Pre SOP phase, Baidu Apollo can open up the human-machine interaction interface, core capability SDK and underlying soft interfaces in the form of APIs and SOA services, enabling car companies to define and implement human-machine interaction interfaces and intelligent driving styles in line with their own brand positioning and target audience, and even participate in the technical aspects of smart driving control to improve end-user experience.
Post SOP delivery, Baidu Apollo can open up the Smart Driving Data Closed Loop Cloud and supporting tool chains to car companies. This will support them to build a data closed loop after the launch of new models so that they can independently carry out data-driven Smart Driving experience improvements and help them to have more control and win the Smart Race.
In the longer term (e.g. 3 years) post SOP, if automotive companies want their models to continue to enjoy the capabilities and experience of Baidu Apollo’s main line of intelligent driving products, Baidu Apollo will also provide them with corresponding solutions, such as in the form of quarterly OTAs, to ensure the quality of their models’ smart driving capabilities.
At the same time, Baidu Apollo will also provide technical support and training to the product, R&D and delivery teams of car companies by setting up a joint product committee in cooperation with them to collaboratively build a more complete intelligent driving ecosystem.
“Car manufacturers and Tier-1 intelligence car solution providers should follow the First Principle Thinking. Always go back to the starting point and build a new cooperation model with the goal of providing consumers with a safe and secure intelligent experience and a real sense of gain,” said Rob Chu, quoting the famous proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others. We know that to make a real contribution to China’s automotive intelligence, we must be open and collaborative.”
Luminar Partners with TPK
At the Shanghai Auto Show, Luminar (Nasdaq: LAZR), a leading global automotive technology company, announced a partnership with TPK, a multi-billion dollar supplier to companies like Apple and Tesla, to build and operate an additional high-volume factory driven by rapidly growing demand for Luminar in Asia. This follows Luminar’s April 13 announcement regarding the successful bring-up of a new high-volume factory in Mexico. Luminar has now established a global manufacturing footprint that spans the United States, Mexico, Thailand, and China. The company is also celebrating the unveiling of Volvo Cars’ EX90 Excellence, which will come with Luminar LiDAR as standard for next-generation safety and autonomous capabilities.
“Volvo has seen first-hand our strong execution and industrialization with the new Mexico factory, and is continuing to double down on Luminar – this time by standardizing us on the new Volvo EX90 Excellence model in the China market,” said Austin Russell, Founder and CEO of Luminar. “At the same time, Luminar is doubling down on Asia with our new TPK partnership for a new dedicated high volume factory in order to meet the exponentially growing demand for our products in the region.”
TPK has a strong track record of execution for producing innovative high-performance and automotive-grade technology at scale, from manufacturing the first smartphone multi-touch display that helped enable the mobile device revolution all the way to developing the first large-format center screen in the automotive industry for consumer production vehicles.
Industrialization to manufacture LiDAR in multi-million quantities is a formidable challenge, but TPK’s automated manufacturing capabilities and plans for Luminar stood out as the most elegant and efficient solution to a complex problem. At the first stage, the new factory will be capable of producing up to 600,000 Luminar LiDAR sensors annually to support awarded programs from automakers including Mercedes-Benz. The factory has the ability to further expand capacity as demand ramps beyond these levels. In consideration of Luminar’s leading technology and economic trajectory, TPK also plans to purchase Luminar stock to reflect TPK’s belief in Luminar’s potential.
Leo Hsieh, President and CEO of TPK said, “We are truly appreciative and pleased with this opportunity to work with Luminar, a world leader in autonomous driving technology. This partnership demonstrates again TPK’s strong engineering and automation capabilities for mass production, in collaboration with various leading technology providers to introduce cutting-edge products to market efficiently and at speed.”
Here at the Shanghai Auto Show, it is clearer than ever that China has strong demand for LiDAR to enable next-generation safety and autonomy. It is estimated that roughly half of the 20 million vehicles sold in China last year were from foreign-branded automakers, many of which are Luminar partners. Of the now more than 20 production vehicle models Luminar is designed into, the majority are also slated for the China market. For example, yesterday in Shanghai, Volvo Cars unveiled the Volvo EX90 Excellence, the new top edition of the all-electric SUV. The Volvo EX90 Excellence features Luminar lidar as standard on every car with the Iris lidar seamlessly integrated into the roofline, marking a pivotal moment for the future of safety as well as assisted and autonomous driving in the automotive industry.
“We have designed the EX90 to be the safest Volvo car to ever hit the road,” says Javier Varela, Deputy CEO and Chief Operating Officer at Volvo Cars. “To understand the outside environment, we are proud to equip the EX90 with cameras, radars and leading Luminar lidar technology to see the road in daylight or darkness at highway speeds.”
Horizon Robotics Powers BYD BEV
Horizon Robotics, a leading provider of energy-efficient computing solutions for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for consumer vehicles, and BYD, a world’s leading manufacturer of new energy vehicles, announced BYD’s proprietary BEV (Bird’s Eye View) perception solution powered by Horizon Robotics’ Journey 5 computing solution will be prepared to enter mass production this year. The announcement was made during the Shanghai Auto Show, marking a significant milestone in the collaboration between the two companies. Both Horizon and BYD are committed to revolutionizing the driving experience for consumers in China.
Hesai Tech Partners with KargoBot
Hesai Technology reached strategic cooperation with autonomous truck company, KargoBot. They will jointly promote the application of automotive-grade, hybrid solid-state lidar AT128 for L4 autonomous trucks, working together to implement safer, more intelligent commercial logistics applications.
Lidar is one of the core sensors for advanced autonomous driving solutions, providing high-precision 3D sensing for autonomous vehicles. Hesai’s AT128 is a long-range and automotive-grade hybrid solid-state lidar integrated with 128 lasers, and an ultra-high-point frequency of 1.53 million points per second.
Since the start of mass production and delivery in 2022, AT128 has empowered the launch of various passenger car models. Last year, Hesai delivered over 60,000 units of AT128 lidar to OEM customers such as Li Auto. Backed by excellent performance, high cost-efficiency, and strong mass-production and delivery capability, AT128 is fully-qualified to empower L4 autonomous trucks.
As a company incubated by Didi Autonomous Driving, KargoBot focuses on the R&D of L4 autonomous driving technology and its commercial operation, with full-stack development capability.
KargoBot has innovatively developed a hybrid-autonomous solution. It includes a pilot ADAS vehicle with a human driver, and multiple L4 self-driving trucks, which greatly improves the capability to deal with various long-tail scenarios and complex interactions during commercial opeartions. Currently, KargoBot has more than 100 autonomous trucks. As of March this year, KargoBot’s cumulative revenue has exceeded 100 million yuan.
KargoBot’s autonomous trucks are the first L4 commercial trucks to use automotive-grade, hybrid solid-state lidar in China. In early 2022, KargoBot successfully integrated 5 AT128 into its autonomous truck, achieving 360 degree FOV coverage, significantly reducing vertical blindspots. After operating in harsh conditions including sand, rain, snow, and unpaved roads for nearly two years, the AT128 lidars are still functioning at zero failure.
Hesai’s AT128 sensor achieves a complete, unstitched field of view and a uniformly distributed structured point cloud, making it algorithm friendly. KargoBot uses image-like data representations and modern computer vision methods to develop AT128’s efficient multi-tasking perception algorithms.
Unlike conventional point cloud algorithms, the perception algorithm organizes AT128’s point cloud data directly into a dense image data format, achieving superior results in real-scenario road testing.
Hesai AT128 has excellent performance, high reliability and high cost-efficiency, which can effectively help KargoBot to develop an autonomous driving system that meets automotive-grade and mass production standards. In the future, Hesai will continue to empower KargoBot to iterate its autonomous driving technology solutions, and promote the large-scale implementation of autonomous logistics.