Chinese internet giant Baidu, known for its search engines, is making significant progress in the field of autonomous vehicles.
The public will be able to use driver’s seats in Wuhan from 7am to 11pm this week without safety guards. Earlier, the company’s unmanned vehicles could be deployed in the city only from 9 am to 5 pm. The improved program plans to add 10 million users in some areas of Wuhan, a city with a population of more than 10 million.
Unlike Tesla’s vision-based solution, Baidu uses a combination of third-party cameras, radar, and lidar to help its cars see better in low-visibility situations.
Baidu began providing fully autonomous robotaxis rides in August, charging users the same as a taxi. The company’s robotics hailing app, Apollo Go, completed more than 474,000 rides in Q3, up 311 percent from the previous quarter. As of Q3, Apollo Go had received over 1.4 million orders overall.
Rita Liao, writing for TechCrunch, said that this sounds like a potentially massive revenue stream for Baidu, but one should be wary of such numbers and wonder how many of those visits are driven by discounts. is supported. How many of these are regular, everyday routes rather than special rides that early adopters take for fun? Chinese robotaxis drivers often offer incentives to the public to ride in their vehicles to boost efficiency numbers.
A report by the outlet said that at this point it is hard to even say which Chinese robotics startup is at the forefront. Their ability to grow depends on how well they fit in with the community in which they live. Larger cities often have specific local legislation.
Local governments across the country are enthusiastically supporting autonomous driving as one of the few remaining areas of the consumer Internet with significant growth potential. For example, Wuhan, a major industrial city in central China, was among the first in the country to allow the use of robotics for public transportation without the need for safety operators in the vehicle. And now, even in the darkest hours of the night, autonomous automobiles can be seen driving around the city.
A healthy dose of skepticism aside, Baidu has made significant efforts to accelerate the arrival of a self-driving future. Vanxen, the same flagship model that supports its text-to-image art platform, is supporting AI in vehicles.
“The model will enable autonomous vehicles to quickly sense an unseen object, such as special vehicle (fire truck, ambulance) identification, plastic bag misidentification, and others,” Baidu said earlier. “In addition, Baidu’s autonomous driving perception model—a sub-model of the WenXin Big Model—which leverages more than 1 billion parameters, is able to dramatically improve the general ability of autonomous driving perception.”
