At the end of March this year, Wang Jin, senior vice president of Baidu and former general manager of the unmanned driving department, publicly stated that he left Baidu and started his own company, Jingchi Technology, and officially entered the field of driverless car startup. Soon the company received a road test license from the California DMV (California Vehicle Authority). Let's take a look at the related content with the car electronics editor.
Wang Jin’s departure is not unexpected, because these two years are a good opportunity for technical talents to start a business. As early as 2016, Baidu's youngest engineer, TOP10, Tiancheng, left Baidu and founded Pony.ai. The same company also obtained the California DMV road test license.
In addition, Li Yanhong’s deputy and the deep architects of the deep learning lab, Yu Kai and Huang Chang, left the company. After the creation of the Horizon Robot, they first demonstrated to the outside world the ADAS (Intelligent Driving Assistance System) for realizing lane/vehicle/pedestrian detection on real vehicles. The product prototype system; later Wu Enda also left, and recently reported that he has started his new project Deeplearning.ai, and speculated that the project may aim to create key facilities for AI technology.
As mentioned above, several resigned members have started their own business. A common feature is that they are all involved in the revolution of unmanned driving.
Did you misunderstand the driverless?
Driverless and autonomous driving are two completely different concepts. To be precise, autonomous driving should be called "assisted driving", and full automatic driving can be called unmanned driving.
Unmanned vehicles use cloud data and more sophisticated algorithmic programs to replace the driver as the "brain" for maneuvering the vehicle. In the unmanned world, humans can switch between passengers and drivers freely. Driving, want to be a passenger without driver, where to go, stop where. Passengers decide, but the car is like an invisible taxi driver, listen to the command to walk. Google even believes that the driverless car can not even have the steering wheel, because the steering wheel and other man-made control parts are the representatives of the civilized retrogression.
While the automatic driving system can also replace the driver to control the vehicle, the system judges that the vehicle control right will be returned to the driver when necessary, and if a traffic accident occurs under the automatic driving condition, the law does not necessarily blame the vehicle. The fault is like the US Tesla accident that has not yet reached a conclusion.
Compared with the relationship between the two, unmanned driving is one level higher than automatic driving, which is the ultimate state of automobile development, also called autonomous driving. For example, Google's driverless car, no steering wheel, no throttle, just a start and stop button, get on the car to set the destination, how to go, how fast to drive, listen to the car. However, the unmanned car that Baidu took on the road was strictly a car with automatic driving function.
At present, from the technical route, autonomous driving has formed two development paths: ADAS and artificial intelligence. One is to cut in with ADAS (Advanced Auxiliary Driving) and gradually automate; one is to use artificial intelligence to cut into automatic driving. The highest form of the two different development paths will be full autonomous driving, ie unmanned.
a revolution of "all people's participation"
The development of automobile manufacturing to today has brought us many difficulties. At the same time, it has brought many problems: traffic congestion, air pollution caused by exhaust emissions, road killers caused by two knives, traffic accidents caused by fatigue, and traffic safety risks caused by fatigue driving...
The number of private cars is increasing, and the utilization rate is extremely low. During the driving period, due to the complicated road conditions and the instability of the driver's own state, there are various serious safety hazards, such as frequent truck accidents on the expressway. In China, according to the latest government directives, traffic safety has surpassed coal mine safety and has become a top security issue to be solved.
Not only China, it is a common problem faced by global cities. Automated driving seems to be the answer people have found for this problem (this is one of the reasons why many companies have to break their heads to come in). With the accumulation of data and the development of technology, the dying powers of all parties must run ahead. Under fierce competition, the trend of unmanned driving cannot be shaken.
Taking this opportunity, Bangge also compiled a domestic and foreign startup company involved in the unmanned field, for your reference.
The above picture is only a list of some startups entering the startup, and from the perspective of the various parties in the automotive field, everyone wants to capture important positions in the next generation of vehicles, although people often think of "unmanned cars" The projects of technology companies, but the efforts of traditional car manufacturers in this field are even worse.
At the CESAsia this year, car company Honda demonstrated a small concept car "HondaNeuV" with an "emotional engine" that can judge the driver's mental condition and assist the driver in driving safely based on the driver's expression and tone. At the same time, it can also learn the driver's lifestyle and preferences by learning, and propose options to the driver according to the situation.
At the CES2017 in Las Vegas at the beginning of this year, Hyundai's IONIQEleCTRic completed the day and night autopilot road test and received the “Level 4†rating from the American Society of Automotive Engineers.
Traditional car manufacturers pay more attention to the performance of the car in the field of driverless cars, and this is also based on their years of automotive manufacturing expertise and industrial design advantages. In addition, traditional car manufacturers will not be so radical, such as not canceling the steering wheel, throttle, brakes and other user driving tools, to a certain extent to protect people's right to drive and fun.
Incredibly, a market research agency released a list of 18 unmanned car manufacturers around the world in a driverless report released recently, and gave a ranking. The top five were respectively for Ford and General Motors. Renault Nissan, Daimler, and Volkswagen are occupied by five traditional car manufacturers.
At the same time, domestic manufacturers are also working hard. In June 2015, BAIC and Didi quickly signed a strategic cooperation agreement, and the two sides will cooperate in depth in the unmanned field. The National Defense University of Science and Technology and FAW Group completed the research and development of the Red Flag HQ3 driverless car in 2011, but no more news has flowed out yet, and commercialization has not progressed. BYD and Singapore Labs reached a research agreement to jointly develop driverless vehicles. Project; Geely Automobile relies on Volvo's safety technology to test the unmanned driving; GAC also cooperated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to carry out unmanned vehicle test; SAIC chose AVIC to jointly carry out relevant tests.
Different from traditional car companies relying on intelligent assistant system upgrades, Internet companies hope to ban the "steering wheel" by cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence in one step, which is another technical route.
The choice of this technical route is undoubtedly related to the Internet technology gene. Of course, the business logic behind it will also promote the difference between the two. The car companies launch self-driving cars, and more from the aspects of active safety, they still It is necessary to rely on the sale of cars to make profits; while Internet companies use cars as intervention points, they are concerned with the improvement of driving experience and the value-added profit points that drivers may bring after their hands are liberated.
In terms of chip makers, this year, Intel spent $15.3 billion (about 105.6 billion yuan) to acquire Mobileye, a self-driving car hardware supplier. In fact, not only the old chip companies like Intel, including Qualcomm and NVIDIA, are in the "fighting" automatic driving.
In fact, shortly after Intel announced the acquisition of Mobileye, its chip rival Nvidia will not be left behind, and announced cooperation with auto parts giant Bosch. The two parties jointly announced that they will jointly develop an artificial intelligence autopilot system, and will also prepare a super chip Xavier, which aims to achieve various types of automatic driving tasks, and the system after the cooperation between the two parties will be sold to all auto manufacturers.
Prior to this, another chip maker Qualcomm acquired NXP, the semiconductor giant in the automotive sector. The company's FreeScale also has strong capabilities in automotive chip manufacturing.
Google driverless and other
In order to better distinguish different levels of autonomous driving technology, the American Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE International) released a six-level classification system for autonomous driving in 2014, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) originally had its own classification system. However, in September 2016 it was converted to a classification standard using SAE.
The SAE standard divides the autopilot technology into 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 levels, for a total of six levels, as shown in the figure:
Why do you always misunderstand driverless?
Most of the cars currently in use today are between level 0 and level 1. The fixed-speed cruises and driver-assisted systems that are widely used on existing models are classified as first- or second-class vehicles. The Autopilot assisted driving technology that Tesla is selling is at level 2.
In fact, the existence of the unmanned third-level is slightly embarrassing. According to the definition of the third level, the human driver must be on standby, ready to respond to system requests and deal with special situations that the system is unable to cope with. One result of this is that human drivers can't get online and play games in cars. Therefore, only in terms of technical standards, Level 3 autopilot has its necessity, but in practical applications, the practicality of this level of autopilot is doubtful.
There are many companies that do the fourth level of automatic driving. For example, a company in Silicon Valley interviewed by Bangge, such as Drive.ai, Baidu Autopilot, Uber, Tesla, BMW, etc., are trying this level of driverless driving, and L4 is also It is regarded by the outside world as a level of obvious business value.
As Google, which popularizes the concept of unmanned driving, its technical route is to directly do L5 fully automatic driving (unmanned driving), which does not match the pace of most automakers and Internet companies. Later, it enters automatic The driving field is basically a gradual development, from low-level or higher-level automatic driving to unmanned driving, and Google is directly positioning itself at the pyramid apex.
Momenta founder Cao Xudong once told Bangge, "Google is doing unmanned vehicles. The line is too long. Although it is well funded and has strong research and development capabilities, it has not been commercialized for so long. The main reason is the current commercial route. If you have a problem, you can say that you have not grasped the core and solved the core problem."
Google's parent company, Alphabet, seems to be very concerned about business interests. When it sold Boston Dynamics to Softbank, it was speculated that it was likely that the company would not be able to produce a marketable product in the next few years. For Google's unmanned driving, it is impossible to go to such a field, but if it wants to commercialize as early as possible, it must lay down its body and evolve step by step according to the overall game rules.
Easy to break into the game
Many companies are fascinated by driverless cars. No one wants to give up such a big business opportunity. People also believe that drones will come into me after all.
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