Baidu has released a series of new products covering intelligent driving, intelligent cabin and intelligent maps. It has also introduced four new key capabilities for car manufacturers.
The China AI giant predicts that by 2026, cars equipped with the L2+ advanced intelligent driving solution, valet parking highway navigation pilot and city navigation pilot will exceed 15 percent of the automobile market, 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, Corporate Vice President and GM of Apollo Self Driving at Baidu, said that 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.
Baidu Apollo has launched its flagship Apollo City Driving Max intelligent driving solution, 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 solution uses a lightweight high HD map that is nearly 80 peercent lighter than traditional HD maps, enabling rapid urban generalisation at a more reasonable cost.
Also upgraded is the integrated Apollo Highway Driving Pro auto-navigation plus valet parking solution. With the latest single TDA4-VH platform, the AI and CPU computing power usage is 50 percent 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.
The Apollo Parking autonomous parking solution has been given a boost, acheiving a success rate of more than 99 percent in the top five most commonly faced parking scenarios. It takes only 28 seconds to complete perpendicular parking, drastically reducing the difficulty of parking for novice drivers.
Baidu Apollo 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 localisation, can achieve full-time full-duplex100 millisecond-level response for an intelligent cabin experience.
The Ernie Bot large language model has been opened up for testing. Baidu is actively exploring using Ernie Big Model’s capabilities to reshape the relationship between the user and smart cabin when travelling, and to create new experiences for the AI smart cabin.
The in-vehicle navigation maps has been upgraded 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 integrated agile development with the traditional V-model followed by Aspice and passed the organisation-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.
Baidu Apollo’s intelligent solutions for automobiles have been mass-produced on 134 models from 31 car brands, totalling more than seven million vehicles.
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. Its goal is to help car manufacturing partners to achieve a leading position and commercial success in intelligent driving, while ensuring quality end-user experiences.
Entelechy Asia 