But for a company that wants to build a car seriously, the preparation period of several months is actually not long. For example, Weilai Automobile took three years from its establishment to the official launch of its first vehicle, the ES8, which is not counting the preparatory period before the establishment of the company. Although Xiaomi officially announced the construction of the car, it can only be regarded as the preparatory period at most, but everyone's attention to Xiaomi car is significantly higher than that of the previous new car-making forces.
Now no one knows what Xiaomi car will look like, but some time ago, a message made the automatic driving of Xiaomi car slowly surface. According to media reports, Xiaomi recently acquired DeepMotion, an autonomous driving company. Xiaomi autopilot may adopt a vision-based solution, configure high-precision maps, and support the technical path of crowdsourcing update.
DeepMotion, also known as Deep Motion Technology, was founded on 20 17, which mainly uses artificial intelligence technology to provide vision-based safe, reliable and mass-produced autopilot solutions. At present, technical schemes such as multi-sensor fusion sensing module, high-precision map automatic composition and high-precision positioning have been developed.
According to official website's data, the four co-founders of DeepMotion, including CEO, CTO, chief scientist and R&D director, all worked in Microsoft Research Institute.
Microsoft Research Asia is known as the Whampoa Military Academy for AI algorithm talents in China. Cao Xudong, CEO of Momenta (an autonomous driving company with a valuation of more than $3 billion), and Ren, a former director, are both from Microsoft Research Asia. Ren Shaoqing later joined Weilai as vice president of automatic driving in Weilai.
The core team of DeepMotion focuses on deep learning and stereoscopic vision in Microsoft sub-research. By 20 18, DeepMotion has the mature ability to make high-speed and fast road high-precision maps on a large scale, and the automation degree of more complex road high-precision maps in the central city has reached 90%.
According to DeepMotion official website, the company currently has four core products, including independent parking service, intelligent perception, high-precision positioning and high-precision maps.
Autonomous parking service, by looking around the fisheye camera, millimeter-wave radar, ultrasonic radar and IMU/GPS positioning module, the driver is not in the car, and the car automatically drives by relying on the memory berth and stops at the corresponding parking space. Applicable basement types include multi-storey basement, roadside parking lot and open-air parking lot.
DeepMotion's visual perception schemes include forward-looking, around-looking and around-looking, as well as multi-lidar perception scheme and laser/vision/millimeter wave radar fusion perception scheme. At present, it supports the perceptual needs of high-speed, urban areas, ports, basements, parks, airports and other different environments. And can identify static objects such as vehicle driving area, traffic signal lamp detection, light pole detection, lane line detection, road traffic sign detection and identification, as well as foreign objects such as cars, trucks, buses, pedestrians detection, tricycles, motorcycles and dynamic objects such as driving area detection.
The high-precision positioning solution can realize the real-time positioning accuracy of 10 cm in urban areas, tunnels, basements and other scenes with weak GPS signals. At the same time, DeepMotion has developed a complete high-precision map solution from data collection, automatic composition, interactive editing and quality inspection.
It can be said that at the algorithmic level of autonomous driving, DeepMotion's technical ability is still very strong. After the acquisition, DeepMotion may have more than 20 people to join Xiaomi, and its backbone personnel will assume the role of the person in charge of each module of autonomous driving.
In addition to the acquisition of DeepMotion, Xiaomi had previously participated in the financing of two autonomous driving related companies, namely the D3 round of financing of Mu Zong Technology and the D round of financing of Jose Technology.
Mu Zong Technology is a supplier of technologies and products for autonomous driving (AD) and advanced driver assistance system (ADAS). Mu Zong Science and Technology was established on 20 13, and has won fixed-point contracts for L4 mass production projects of several domestic automakers, and established mass production cooperation relations with many domestic mainstream host manufacturers such as FAW Hongqi and Changan Automobile.
Jose Technology is a manufacturer of self-driving lidar, which is an important hardware for smart cars to upgrade to advanced self-driving. It is reported that the investment will be used to produce hybrid solid-state lidar and develop automotive-grade lidar chips.
Therefore, at the level of intelligent driving, Xiaomi automobile should have automatic driving assistance functions such as ACC adaptive cruise, automatic lane change assistance, lane keeping and automatic parking. The model equipped with lidar can realize L3 or even L4 autopilot function. After all, it should be a few years after the official listing of Xiaomi Automobile. By then, autonomous driving may have become the standard for smart cars.
In addition to autonomous driving, what other functions will Xiaomi Automobile have? Before the announcement of building a car, Xiaomi was close to the car in patent. At present, the number of patents related to automobiles has reached 834, and 446 patents are related to autonomous driving, mainly focusing on wireless communication technology, driverless, vehicle control, direct communication, vehicle networking, gesture control and so on.
For example, the enterprise search App shows that on July 6th, Beijing Xiaomi Mobile Phone Software Co., Ltd. disclosed the patent of "vehicle and its control method, device, terminal and storage medium", WeChat official account CN 1 13069774A. The patent abstract shows that this disclosure belongs to the technical field of remote control. The terminal generates a temperature adjustment command according to the current environmental information, and adjusts the tire hardness by adjusting the tire temperature, so that the tire hardness can adapt to different external environments, reduce tire wear during driving, and enhance the driving performance of the vehicle.
The tire is soft at high temperature, and the driving comfort and grip are better; When the temperature is low, the tire is relatively hard and more wear-resistant. It seems to be a practical small function to adjust the hardness through the temperature of the tire.
Thanks to Xiao Ai, Xiaomi's voice control system should be one of the best smart cars at present. By accessing Mijia, you can also control the smart home in the car.
With reference to the practicality and functional integrity of MIUI, the MIUI of the car version may be closer to the smart tablet or smart phone in terms of functional interface, menu hierarchy design and operation fluency.
As for the model and price, according to Xiaomi's consistent thinking, we should fully respect the suggestion of rice noodles. Lei Jun once launched a poll on Weibo, which was "What car do you want Xiaomi's first car to be" and "What price do you want Xiaomi's first car to be". As for the models, the voting results show that cars are the most popular, followed by SUVs, and there is little difference between them.
In terms of price, the most choice is within 65438+100000, followed by 10- 15,15-200000, 200000-300000 or more. This shows that the vast majority of rice noodles still hope that the price of millet carts will be within 1.5 million.
If Xiaomi's first car had a complete assisted driving function (fully automatic driving option), the battery life was good, the car was smooth, the function was rich, and the price was less than 1.5 million, would you buy such a Xiaomi car?