Bitauto News? On May 18, 2021, Baidu Apollo and Hesai Technology signed a strategic cooperation agreement. According to the agreement, Baidu Apollo will customize Hesai Technology's new architecture lidar for use in the fifth-generation fully driverless autonomous vehicle (Robataxi). The two parties will also cooperate in research and exploration on the application of a hybrid solid-state lidar, which has not yet been made public.
As a key mass-produced component of the fifth-generation self-driving car, the lidar customized by Baidu Apollo will be used in the commercial operation of self-driving cars, and its performance is compared to the same type of general-purpose ones. The version lidar has been greatly improved, while the cost has been reduced by nearly 50%.
Among them, the proximity measurement accuracy of the customized lidar has been improved to ±2cm. Thanks to the optimization of the line beam angle resolution and Baidu's super sensing algorithm capabilities, its actual effective sensing distance will be 1.5 times that of the leading products on the market. In a real manned commercial operation scenario, safety is the first priority, and the system must be more reliable. The complete system safety system of customized lidar can provide nearly a hundred types of fault diagnosis and radar surface dirt detection functions, and can accurately detect sewage, mud, severe dust, scratches, etc. in real time. In addition, it applies the first lidar active network protection mechanism, which can effectively prevent point cloud data from being tampered with and the radar's internal storage, communication, and logic units from being counterfeited, ensuring the safety of operating vehicles.
In addition, the usage scenario of Baidu Apollo’s customized lidar is multi-city, large-scale normal operation. In order to facilitate the smooth operation of more than thousands of self-driving vehicles in the future, this lidar will simultaneously support OTA to meet the needs of batch intelligent management and remote upgrade iterations, greatly reducing operation and maintenance costs and improving efficiency.
It is worth mentioning that Baidu Apollo’s fifth-generation self-driving car is designed for fully driverless commercial operation scenarios. It will be put on the road for testing as soon as June and is planned to be launched before the third quarter of this year. Installed for mass production. The new generation of mass-produced vehicles uses Apollo’s fifth-generation autonomous driving kit, including Hesai Technology’s custom-made lidar, with performance increased by 10 times and cost reduced by half.
Company Profile:
Hesai Technology is the world's leading 3D sensor (lidar) manufacturer. It has customers in 7 cities in 23 countries and regions around the world, and has completed hundreds of millions of dollars in financing so far. Investors include the German Bosch Group, Lightspeed, Baidu and other world-renowned industry companies and investment institutions. Hesai lidar products have top performance in the industry, can be mass-produced and have outstanding reliability, and have patent layouts around the world. According to data from three parties, Hesai ranks first in the world in terms of market share in the global Robotaxi main radar market. In 2018, Baidu led the Series B investment in Hesai Technology.
Baidu Apollo self-driving travel service Apollo GO has fully opened large-scale and regular operations in Changsha, Cangzhou, and Beijing. In the near future, it will also open free autonomous vehicles in Guangzhou and Shanghai. Serve. As of the end of 2020, Apollo GO has received more than 210,000 passengers. On May 2, 2021, Baidu Apollo has launched normalized commercial operations of fully driverless autonomous vehicles in Beijing. In the next three years, Baidu Apollo will launch 3,000 private autonomous vehicles in 30 cities.