Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU), announced today that more than 50
partners have joined the Apollo open autonomous driving project,
forming one of the largest and most diverse autonomous driving
ecosystems to accelerate the development and adoption of autonomous
driving.
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at
http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3240632e-fc97-487d-a43e-a2fce001c8f0
Members of the Apollo alliance are from a wide
range of sectors. They include leading vehicle manufacturers, such
as Chery Automobile, FAW Group Corporation, Changan Automobile
Group, and Great Wall Motors; tier 1 suppliers, including Bosch,
Continental Automotive, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, and Desay SV
Automotive, among others; key components providers, such as NVIDIA,
Microsoft Cloud, ZTE, Velodyne and TomTom; startups, including
AutonomouStuff and Horizon Robotics; and ridesharing companies,
such as UCAR and Grab Taxi.
The alliance also extends to five top universities
and six local governments, including Wuhu in Anhui Province,
Baoding in Hebei Province, Yizhuang in Beijing, Chongqing
Liangjiang New Area, and Shanghai International Automobile
City.
Qi Lu, Baidu’s group president and COO, made the
announcement earlier today in Beijing at Baidu Create, the
company’s inaugural AI Developer Conference.
“Apollo is an important milestone for the
automotive industry,” said Lu. “It is in essence the “Android” of
the autonomous driving industry, but more open and more
powerful.”
First announced in April, Apollo is an open
platform that provides a comprehensive, secure, and reliable
solution that supports all major features and functions of an
autonomous vehicle. The project, named after the historic lunar
landing program to illustrate its scale and complexity, consists of
cloud services, an open software stack, along with reference
hardware and vehicle platforms.
Apollo can bolster the work of any developer in
autonomous driving, using high-quality source code and data, which
developers can use as much or as little as they wish. Open source
code portions can be modified, and open capability components are
accessible through an API that can be replaced with proprietary
implementations.
One of the biggest challenges to developing a
robust autonomous driving system is having sufficient data to
iterate the software and train the AI models. Apollo’s simulation
tools and services provide a key solution that is backed by vast
amounts of actual autonomous driving scene data, which enables
developers to accelerate software iteration and ultimately shorten
the development cycle.
“Apollo is not solely Baidu’s. It belongs to
everyone in the ecosystem. And as we and our partners contribute to
the platform in our areas of specialty, we all gain more, with the
results far greater than just our own,” Lu added.
As an open platform, Apollo’s capabilities will be
opened gradually, beginning with autonomous driving technologies
for restricted areas in July and fully autonomous driving on urban
roads and highways by the end of 2020.
At the Baidu Create conference, AutonomouStuff, a
U.S.-based autonomous system components supplier, showcased two
cars they converted into autonomous vehicles in just three days
using code and capabilities provided by Apollo’s first released 1.0
version. The two vehicles completed circuits around a short track
near the conference venue.
“The data and technologies Apollo can provide will
increase significantly as partners grow,” said Robert Hambrick,
founder and CEO of AutonomouStuff. “This means developers no longer
need to do duplicate work developing low-level technologies but can
spend more resources on later-stage development, which in turn will
greatly accelerate the progress of the autonomous driving
industry.”
In a speech at the conference, Pradeep Gupta,
senior manager of Autonomous Driving at NVIDIA said, “Apollo’s
strategy of opening up its resources is a step in the right
direction. Through close collaboration with each and every player
in the industry, we can more effectively build a new and complete
autonomous driving ecosystem.”
Before the kickoff of Baidu Create, Baidu and FAW
Group Corporation, a major Chinese carmaker, unveiled a
comprehensive cooperation agreement to jointly explore the
commercialization of autonomous driving technology. Qian Li,
director of FAW R&D Center said, “FAW and Baidu will work
together across products, technologies, services, and other areas
to create an “Internet plus car” innovation cooperation model.”
Chery Automobile also attended the conference as an
important ecosystem partner. “With the joint efforts of Apollo’s
ecosystem partners, we hope to drive the construction of autonomous
driving related laws and accelerate the mass production of
autonomous cars,” said Weiyi Lu, assistant general manager of
Chery.
Media contact:
Baidu International Communications
intlcomm@baidu.com
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