Baidu officially offers completely driverless electric robotaxi service with Apollo RT6 EV
- Tram Ho
Baidu will add a new autonomous vehicle model – the Apollo RT6 EV – a hybrid SUV and minivan with a detachable steering wheel – to its Apollo Go ride-hailing service next year.
The new battery-powered robotaxi is Baidu’s sixth-generation autonomous vehicle and the first to be built on the company’s Xinghe self-driving vehicle platform. The automaker says that developing a new battery-electric architecture has helped cut production costs to $37,000 per vehicle.
Baidu says recent advances in manufacturing have cut production costs, allowing it to build and operate tens of thousands of robotaxi on a scale across China’s megacities including Beijing, Shanghai, and Beijing. Guangzhou and Shenzhen next year.
Robin Li, CEO and co-founder of Baidu, said at the Baidu World 2022 technology conference: “This massive cost reduction will allow us to deploy tens of thousands of AVs across China.” I am looking to a future where traveling by robotaxi will be half the cost of traveling by taxi today.”
The RT6 has seating for two to four passengers. The detachable steering wheel will create more space for “seats, vending machines, laptops or game consoles,” the company says. The sunroof extends to the full length of the car to help better catch natural light into the cabin.
Apollo RT6 comes with L4 autopilot with 38 sensors – including dozens of cameras – to navigate on the move and provide the optimal solution in the event of traffic jams or unexpected traffic incidents. .
Baidu has not revealed how many kilometers it can travel when fully charged.
The company also said that Baidu will commercialize its robotaxi business in the near future with 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030.
Baidu’s L4 autonomous driving system has been able to cope with the complex road conditions in Chinese cities since previous generations of robotaxi.
Baidu’s robotaxi has been put into operation on open roads in many cities, including Beijing Yizhuang, Shougang Park, Guangzhou…
On Apollo RT6, L4 capabilities have been upgraded and new features are added. When the fifth-generation RT was announced last July, Apollo’s cumulative test mileage was still 12 million km, and now this number has exceeded 32 million km.
These data are all actual road conditions in China collected, deployed and operated by Baidu robotaxi, from which the measured data shows a higher safety compared to the driver.
In terms of hardware, it is equipped with 38 sensors on the vehicle, 6 millimeter wave radars, 12 ultrasonic radars and 12 cameras. The multi-sensor is deeply integrated, with stronger sensing ability and higher accuracy.
The basic computing power adopts the main redundant dual compute unit, and the computing power can reach 1200Tops.
In addition, Apollo RT6 has made great progress in the ability of L4 to cover most of the complex road conditions in the city, and the passenger experience is also more comfortable and smooth.
In fact, Baidu’s robotaxi service already has a license to provide services in Chongqing, Wuhan, and Beijing through the company’s autonomous ride-hailing unit, Apollo Go. However, the service in Beijing is not yet a commercial service – Baidu provides a free driverless driving service in the name of R&D and is accepted by the public – and Beijing’s license still requires users to controls in the front passenger seat of the vehicle.
The models currently in circulation are still just previous versions of the RT6, so we can only see those promises in the near future. But at the moment, we can still see how the robotaxi in China are working.
References: Zhihu; Techcrunch
Source : Genk