- Baidu plans to establish the world's largest fully driverless
ride-hailing service area in 2023
- Baidu continues to show growth momentum as the world's largest
robotaxi service provider, reaching 1.4 million orders by Q3
2022
- Baidu unveiled a series of autonomous driving technology
breakthroughs including the industry's first big model built for
autonomous driving, aiming to eliminate longstanding industry-wide
challenges in vehicle recognition
BEIJING, Nov. 29,
2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU
and HKEX: 9888) ("Baidu" or the "Company"), a leading AI company
with strong internet foundation, today announced plans to build the
world's largest autonomous ride-hailing service area in 2023. The
announcement came during a celebration of Apollo Day, Baidu's autonomous driving tech
event (Click to replay 2022 Baidu Apollo Day). The plan outlined a
goal to expand the operation area for Baidu's fully driverless
robotaxis, allowing Baidu to reach more potential customers.
Additionally, Baidu revealed a series of new technology
breakthroughs including an AI big model built for autonomous
driving perception, high-definition autonomous driving maps, a
closed-loop autonomous driving data system, and the successful
end-to-end adaptation of AI chips for autonomous vehicles.
Baidu to build the world's largest fully driverless
ride-hailing service area in 2023, maintaining growth momentum as
the world's biggest robotaxi service provider
Since August 2022, Baidu has
already rolled out fully driverless ride-hailing services (with no
human drivers in the car) in the cities of Chongqing and Wuhan, with access to hundreds of square
kilometers of operation area. Based on this leading position, Baidu
will continue to expand its operation area next year to build the
world's largest service area for fully driverless robotaxi
service.
Currently, Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing platform Apollo Go
covers more than 10 cities in China including all first-tier cities. In Q3
2022 alone, Apollo Go has completed more than 474,000 rides, up
311% year over year, and a 65% increase compared to last quarter.
In first-tier cities like Beijing
and Shanghai, each robotaxi on
Apollo Go can provide 15 rides a day on average, nearly the same
daily ride average of typical online ride-hailing car services. By
the end of Q3 2022, the accumulated rides provided to the public by
Apollo Go have reached 1.4 million. As Baidu continues to scale up
its operation area of robotaxi service, it is one step closer to
the goal of providing autonomous driving services to more people,
while further strengthening its leading position in the global
autonomous ride-hailing market.
"Backed by its solid AI technology, Baidu Apollo has created a
safe, intelligent and efficient autonomous
driving technology system, bringing robotaxi services from
designated zones to open roads at scale," said Jingkai Chen,
Baidu's autonomous driving technology expert at the event. The
generalization ability of Baidu's autonomous driving technology has
progressed at a more advanced pace than expected. Now, the lead
time to deploy autonomous driving technology in a new city is only
20 days.
Industry's first AI big model for autonomous driving,
addressing the "long tail" problem
The AV industry has long grappled with the "long tail" problem,
in which an autonomous vehicle runs into a scenario it has not seen
or experienced before. To address this problem, Baidu's autonomous
driving technology expert Jingdong
Wang has announced the industry's first AI big model for
autonomous driving, a pre-trained visual-language model with weak
supervision, backed by the Baidu WenXin Big Model, which recognizes
thousands of objects, helping to enlarge the scope of semantic
recognition. The model will enable autonomous vehicles to quickly
make sense of an unseen object, such as special vehicle (fire
truck, ambulance) recognition, plastic bag misdetection, and
others. In addition, Baidu's autonomous driving perception model—a
sub-model of the WenXin Big Model—leveraging more than 1 billion
parameters, is able to dramatically improve the generalization
potential of autonomous driving perception.
High-definition autonomous driving map to safeguard a smarter
and more efficient autonomous driving experience
"Baidu's new generation autonomous driving map is equipped with
comprehensive capabilities such as automatic production, real-time
fusion, and knowledge enhancement." according to Jizhou Huang, Baidu's autonomous driving
technology expert. It will be put into mass production to realize a
"safe, reliable and efficient" autonomous driving experience.
- 96% automation rate for map production: With AI as the
key driving force to increase efficiency and bring down the cost,
the automation rate of Baidu's high precision map production has
now reached 96%.
- Real-time map update to ensure driving safety: The
integration of vehicle-side perception data and multi-source maps
to generate online maps in real time has helped to significantly
ensure the safety of autonomous driving.
- Massive data plus human driver knowledge to improve driving
reliability: With more than 12 million kilometers of road
networks and data accumulated on Baidu Maps, along with hundreds of
millions of human drive-hours, Baidu's autonomous driving map
effectively integrates these data points to improve the reliability
of autonomous driving.
Closed-loop data system to further enhance the intelligence
of autonomous driving
With autonomous vehicles being deployed at a larger scale, the
scale of data received will also increase exponentially. This
brings challenges to identifying valuable data and efficiently
using data to continuously improve autonomous driving. Ang Li, Baidu's technology expert, introduced
the concept of "Fine Purification, Strong Ingestion" and
Apollo Loop, a closed-loop data
system, to effectively identify and utilize data. To purify the
data, the system leverages both on-board small AI models and
cloud-based big AI model to achieve high-efficiency data mining and
automated labeling. The data ingestion architecture achieves
automated training with its group-optimization ability and data
distribution understanding to effectively utilize data and further
enhance the overall intelligence of autonomous driving.
Developing a mutually reinforcing parallel use model for L4
and L2+ autonomous driving technologies
Baidu is also actively bringing autonomous driving technology to
empower advanced assisted driving products. Baidu's autonomous
driving technology expert Liang Wang
explained how Baidu is leveraging its decade-long experience in
autonomous driving to explore a technical route through which L4
and L2+ autonomous driving can coexist. Currently, the technology
stack level enables the unification of L4 and L2+ smart driving
products in terms of visual perception scheme, technical
architecture, map unification, data interconnection and
infrastructure sharing. Baidu envisions a mutually beneficial
relationship in which L4 will continue to provide advanced
technology migration for L2+ smart driving products in urban use
cases, while L2 data feedback will also help to improve L4
generalization ability.
Baidu's Kunlun AI chip completed end-to-end autonomous
driving real-world testing
Jian Ouyang, CEO of Kunlun Chip,
also revealed at today's event that Baidu's 2nd-gen Kunlun AI chip
has completed an end-to-end performance adaptation for autonomous
driving. This marks a major milestone further solidifying and
integrating Baidu's advantages in both autonomous driving software
and hardware.
About Baidu
Founded in 2000, Baidu's mission is to make the complicated
world simpler through technology. Baidu is a leading AI company
with strong Internet foundation, trading on the NASDAQ under "BIDU"
and HKEX under "9888." One Baidu ADS represents eight Class A
ordinary shares.
Media Contact
Intlcomm@baidu.com
View original
content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-announces-plan-to-build-the-worlds-largest-fully-driverless-ride-hailing-service-area-in-2023-301688518.html
SOURCE Baidu, Inc.