The COVID-19 epidemic affects the hearts of every Chinese, and everyone is fighting the cunning virus in their own way.
Unmanned vehicles in combat
During the fight against the epidemic, many fields have deployed some unmanned devices as tools to assist work and life. For example, patrol police use unmanned vehicles. Humans and machines supervise passers-by to wear masks, hospital robots deliver meals to patients, unmanned vehicles deliver express delivery, remote-controlled toy cars go out to buy groceries...
Baidu Apollo has also recently opened its vulgar mini car kit and autonomous driving for free. Cloud services, and provide financial support for software, services, hardware and implementation during the research and development process.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic, Baidu Apollo has sent technicians to the front line to deploy unmanned disinfection robots in the isolation areas of confirmed patients in various hospitals to reduce the number of medical staff entering and exiting the isolation areas and protect the health of medical staff; The unmanned logistics vehicles and unmanned cleaning and disinfection vehicles respectively developed by Apollo ecological partners Neolithic and Zhixue Technology have also arrived at isolation points in Wuhan and Beijing and are used for independent cleaning, disinfection and meal delivery services in the isolation areas.
The assistance of robots effectively reduces the contact between people and minimizes the possibility of epidemic spread. At the same time, the application of unmanned equipment during the epidemic has also made people re-examine autonomous driving technology. Can autonomous driving do anything in public health prevention and control, urban emergency response and other fields?
Yu Guo, Director of New Energy Product Planning of Great Wall Motors, said in an interview with Auto Headlines APP, “The starting point of driverless technology is to solve the problem of how to complete tasks in an environment without human participation, as large as aerospace. , as small as personal care, are all important areas for the development of these technologies, and the same is true for this epidemic. However, before the outbreak, Guotai Minan, the media and the market focused more on the field of transportation and driving. ”
Yu Guo also said, “In fact, research and development has been ongoing in recent years. However, after this epidemic, attention has been increased to special application scenarios such as public health prevention and control, urban emergency response, etc., and the level of attention has also increased. It will promote technological development in this field. At the same time, the epidemic will definitely accelerate the acceptance of technologies such as autonomous driving, robots, and AI, and will accelerate the development of such technologies for civilian use.”
Indeed. In this way, autonomous driving technology has always been one of the important R&D projects of car companies, especially the new domestic car-making forces, which want to be the first to take the lead in this regard.
Autonomous driving in its infancy
According to the information previously released by the new car-making forces, most of them already have L2 level autonomous driving capabilities. It already has L2.5 capabilities and will upgrade to L3 in 2020. Byton also already has L3 highly autonomous driving capabilities. NIO also said it will release models with L4 autonomous driving capabilities in 2020.
Domestic traditional car companies appear to be a little behind, but they pay more attention to the mass production level of technology. The L4 self-driving model cooperated by FAW and Baidu Apollo was produced in small batches in 2019 and stated that it would be fully mass-produced in 2020; GAC had planned to mass-produce L3 self-driving cars in early 2020, becoming the first truly domestically produced car. Car companies launching self-driving vehicles; BAIC, Great Wall, Changan, Chery and other car companies plan to achieve mass production of L3 self-driving models in 2020. Geely said it will release an L3 (GPILOT3.0) platform in 2020.
Although car companies spare no effort in research and development, there are still very few projects that have been implemented so far, and most of them are in the testing and trial operation stages.
Dongfeng Motor obtained the L3 autonomous driving road test license in April 2018. After the National Intelligent Connected Vehicle (Wuhan) Test Demonstration Zone was officially unveiled in September 2019, Dongfeng Motor obtained 6 A test license plate, including 3 main line logistics vehicles, 1 branch line logistics vehicle, 1 sanitation vehicle and 1 RoboTaxi car. Zhu Yanfeng, Chairman and Party Secretary of Dongfeng Motor Corporation, drove autonomous vehicles many times in 2019.
In addition to personal travel business, Dongfeng's autonomous driving business in public travel such as minibuses, unmanned rescue vehicles, unmanned vending trucks, and unmanned Fengchao is gradually entering testing.
WeRide, founded in 2017, is a rapidly developing travel company and has now entered the trial operation stage. On February 14, WeRide and its joint venture WeRide Guangdong released the trial operation report of China's first L4 self-driving taxi Robo-Taxi.
The report stated that in the first month of WeRide Guangdong’s trial operation, that is, from December 1 to 31, 2019, the Robo-Taxi*** completed 8,396 travel services, accounting for the total order demand Of the 62,000 safety incidents, it has served 4,683 users, and 94 passengers gave it the highest five-star rating. Robo-Taxi only provides services within the scope of electronic fences. There are no long-distance orders such as highways and airports, and there are safety officers in the car for supervision.
WeRide founder and CEO Han Xu once emphasized: "Under the premise of ensuring safety, having enough technology and confidence to remove the safety guard from the car is a sign of mass production." He It was also stated that in 2020, WeRide will gradually remove safety personnel in some areas to realize truly driverless Robo-Taxi.
Robo-Taxi is the goal of many car companies. The Honda NeuV concept car released by Honda in 2017 is equipped with this function. Honda said that it will explore the possibility of expanding mobility tools through autonomous driving technology and AI. , when the owner does not use the car and authorizes it, the vehicle can be used for autonomous driving, carpooling, and become a car that can make money to support the family.
Coincidentally, Tesla has also redefined the "travel unit". When the vehicle is idle, it drives itself out as an Uber and becomes a means of transportation to help car owners make money. It is essentially similar to Robo-taxi. At Tesla's "Autonomous Driving Investor Day", Tesla CEO Musk also made it clear that he hopes to obtain regulatory approval for his fully autonomous vehicles by 2020 and launch 1 million robots. taxi.
However, at present, none of this has yet been realized.
As for why the implementation of autonomous driving is so slow, Yu Guo explained this using Great Wall Motors as an example: "Great Wall Motors has never stopped researching basic technologies and application scenarios, including from Euler to WEY, all have autonomous driving functions. However, for autonomous driving to be put into actual use, it is not only a simple technical issue, but also involves many aspects such as infrastructure and accident determination regulations. Therefore, in the short term, it can Under some restricted conditions, L4 autonomous driving can be achieved in an area or a certain distance, but it will still be a relatively long process to fully put it on the road. ”
Expanding application scenarios
It is worth mentioning that before the outbreak, it was not that no car companies had implemented corresponding medical emergency scenarios for such emergencies.
Among them, the most touching one is a 2017 Audi commercial. In the film, a pregnant woman who is alone at home suddenly wants to give birth. Her Audi AI smart car senses the changes in her body through the pregnant woman's wearable device, automatically appears at her door, and notifies her family and contacts the hospital on the way to the hospital. The doctor then played soothing music to relax the pregnant woman until she arrived at the hospital to meet her family and doctors.
Judging from this sudden epidemic situation, more and more car companies are making technical reserves in autonomous driving. However, at present, most of the ones that can be put into use immediately are some logisticsless vehicles. People and cars.
Several passenger car companies and autonomous driving technology suppliers interviewed by the Auto Headlines APP all said that the space for autonomous driving of passenger cars is still very limited in the face of this epidemic. Regarding Future related response plans are still under discussion.
Recently, Germany's Rheinland TV Group issued the ISO? 26262 functional safety management certification to Huawei's MDC intelligent driving computing platform, which means that Huawei, which "does not build cars, only acts as an automotive supplier", is in the process of research and development. With new breakthroughs, Huawei's MDC intelligent driving computing platform has been recognized by the automotive industry in terms of safety.
Huawei is a representative of domestic technology flow. Although it has giant partners such as BMW, Daimler, and Audi, it must be mentioned that in the field of autonomous driving, our country is still limited in some key technologies. to foreign manufacturers.
my country’s local suppliers started late in sensors such as millimeter-wave radar, lidar, chips, etc., and have relatively little technology accumulation. At the same time, they are developing basic frameworks and systems for embedded HPC and AI that will be needed later. There are no obvious advantages in terms of functional safety, etc., so building a complete ecological chain will still face certain challenges.
The sudden outbreak of the epidemic has also shown us that there is still a certain distance from the arrival of autonomous driving as imagined. However, the epidemic has also brought us to explore more scenarios of autonomous driving in the future. Autonomous driving not only provides convenience for private cars, but also has other promising areas. At the same time, driverless driving also requires faster research and development and sufficient testing to calmly deal with various unexpected scenarios that enter people's lives.
This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.