Baidu's first robocar looks like the future we envisioned 20 years ago
The vehicle will be equipped with Nvidia's Orin X chip as well as 31 external sensors including LiDAR, millimeter wave radar, ultrasonic radar and 12 cameras.
Chinese tech giant Baidu has unveiled a vehicle called ROBO-01. With this design, EV subsidiary JIDU and Chinese automaker Geely hope to become the leader in a fully autonomous automotive world.
The ROBO-01, which Baidu announced on Wednesday, is an all-electric hatchback with a bird-wing front door, a foldable steering wheel, and a high edge in computer technology. The car will use Baidu's Apollo platform, which is used by many automakers in China. According to the company, they have accumulated nearly 17 million miles (27 million km) of supervised autonomous driving through robotics using the platform.
The vehicle will be equipped with Nvidia's Orin X chip as well as 31 external sensors including LiDAR, millimeter wave radar, ultrasonic radar and 12 cameras. According to Baidu, the entire system has been thoroughly tested and verified through JIDU's simulation vehicle technology called JIDU SIMUCar.
Baidu also equips the vehicle with a fourth-generation automotive Snapdragon chip Qualcomm's Cockpit Platform 8295 that enables large car-mounted displays to display 3D images for navigation, game and "office scenarios" online". According to the automaker, the "human-like" voice assistant is also in the car, providing offline responses within milliseconds.
According to CEO Xia Yiping via Wired, the technological prowess of the training algorithms that power Baidu's self-driving technology can be compared to that of Tesla's custom supercomputer called Autopilot. Yiping also told the magazine that the leap from building software to making hardware came from a desire to unify the two ideas.
JIDU plans to launch a limited-edition production model in the fall that will be "90% similar" to the concept, and the company will unveil the second iteration of the concept design at the Guangzhou Auto Show. this year.
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