The concept of self-driving cars is not new. As early as 1939, GM floated the idea of cars driving themselves in its Futurama exhibition at the World’s Fair in New York.

It wasn’t until the 1990s or much later, though, when self-driving cars started to become more realistic thanks to breakthroughs in computer processing power, artificial intelligence, sensors, and robotic controls. Google, Intel, Uber, Tesla, Ford, GM, and BMW have all been scrambling to take a lead in the nascent field of autonomous vehicles (AVs).

Many industry observers have long assumed that AV is a domain that foreign-owned companies will dominate. In fact, Chinese companies didn’t even start to come into the field until a few years ago. But to the surprise of many players abroad, Apollo, an autonomous vehicle platform that Chinese internet giant Baidu launched only a year ago, quickly gained recognition and has grown to be the leading player in the AV industry.

Apollo: ‘Android for automated vehicles’

On April 19, 2017, Baidu officially announced the Apollo plan, billed as the first system-wide opening of the global automated driving technology. Baidu says that Apollo is “a complete open automatic driving ecosystem” that can help partners in the automotive industry and autonomous driving to combine vehicle software and hardware systems to quickly build their own complete AV system.

The Apollo platform consists of three parts: localization, open-software platform, and cloud-service platform. Baidu explains on its Apollo website that the Apollo platform provides partners with high-precision map services with advanced technology, extensive coverage, and high automation. Apollo also offers a simulation engine, which the company claims as “the only one in the world that is open and is equipped with massive data.” Moreover, Apollo’s end-to-end autonomous driving algorithm has “the world’s largest volume of deep-learning data sets” that are open.

For Apollo to become a complete AV platform vendor, it also needs chips, sensors, vehicle architecture, and other pieces of hardware to support Apollo’s software algorithms. Therefore, Baidu chose to cooperate with auto suppliers and OEMs both at home and abroad. As Baidu provides its software platform, auto suppliers offer hardware integration, productization, and manufacturing facilities where final products can be produced.

By leveraging these hardware modules produced by its suppliers, Baidu offers a “reference vehicle platform” including computing units; "reference hardware platform" consisting of sensors such as GPS, cameras, and lidar; and human-to-machine interface devices. While Baidu won’t be directly involved in the production of hardware, it will offer services including the reference hardware platform and reference vehicle platform. The mass production of AVs based on the Apollo platform will be left to auto manufacturers.

With the support of the Apollo platform, partners can develop, test, and deploy autonomous vehicles faster. As more partners get involved, Apollo expects that they will be able to accumulate and amass more driving data. Compared with a closed-system approach opted by foreign manufacturers, Baidu believes that Apollo can mature AV technology at a faster rate, giving each participant more benefits.

Apollo: ‘Android for automated vehicles’

Baidu intends to build Apollo as “Android for automated vehicles.” By using the same “open-source” playbook that helped Android to become the most dominant operating system platform in the global smartphone market, Baidu is betting on Apollo, hoping that it will take the global AV industry by storm. Tech communities in Europe and the United States are reportedly already applauding Apollo’s pioneering efforts to push the open-source practice into the AV industry.

Milestones of the Apollo plan

Baidu has been investing heavily in the research and development of self-driving cars since 2015 — well before it unveiled its Apollo plan. In December 2015, Baidu conducted full-AV driving tests on both highways and urban roads in Beijing.

In September 2016, Baidu obtained a road test license for driving autonomous vehicles in California, and in November of the same year, Baidu launched an open-circuit driverless car trial operation in Wuzhen, Zhejiang.

On April 19, 2017, Baidu officially announced the Apollo platform. At that time, the industry commented highly, but Baidu did not release anything substantial.

On July 5, 2017, Baidu released Apollo 1.0, an important milestone in the Apollo project. In the 1.0 release, Baidu made available the company’s very valuable data including closed-track automated driving and end-to-end self-positioning.

On Sept. 20, 2017, Baidu released Apollo version 1.5. Its focus was on opening five core competencies, including object awareness, decision-planning, cloud simulation, high-precision map services, and end-to-end learning. Among them, the first four capabilities were made openly available for the first time. The self-driving car built on the 1.5 version can support both day and night fixed-lane auto-driving, enabling AVs to identify objects in the night environment and other obstacles in atypical traffic scenarios. Some media claimed that this was what Apollo 1.0 should have had.

On Jan. 9, 2018, Baidu launched Apollo version 2.0, which supports automated driving on simple urban roads. Apollo 2.0 also introduced a “scenario-based,” commercial driverless solution. Four major AV processing platform vendors including Intel, Nvidia, NXP, and Renesas now support Apollo 2.0. The Apollo platform now provides four modules including cloud services, software platforms, reference hardware platforms, and reference vehicle platforms.

By: DocMemory
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