China’s Google, Baidu succesfully develops autonomous self-driving car – Fullerton Tech Day

Chinese Internet search giant Baidu announced on Thursday that its self-driving car has “successfully completed rigorous, fully autonomous tests… under a variety of environmental conditions.” The vehicle, a modified BMW 3 Series, is said to have made right, left and U-turns, slowing down if it detected vehicles ahead, changed lanes, passed other cars and merged into traffic on the highway

Baidu started to working Autonomous self-driving car in 2013

Baidu started working on the technology back in 2013, and says it aims to map the majority of China’s roads with its own 3D mapping system within 10 years. That’s no small feat, considering the size of the country.
The car reached a top speed of 100 kilometers per hour (62 miles per hour) during the test runs on a 30-kilometer route, which began and ended at Baidu’s Beijing headquarters near Zhongguancun Science Park in Haidian District.
Baidu, which revealed last year that it was developing a driverless car, tied with BMW to jointly research driverless car technologies. Earlier this year, Wang Jin, a company executive, said at a conference that a self-driving car would be launched in China with BMW by the end of this year.
The autonomous capabilities demonstrated by the Baidu car are also being tested by other companies aiming to offer self-driving cars, including Google. The Chinese player could, however, be a serious contender in the autonomous car market, particularly because of its strong brand and presence in China.
Better known for its search engine, Baidu has also ventured into devices like a wearable called Baidu Eye that could rival Google Glass. The self-driving cars are being researched by Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning since 2013.
According to the company, the modified BMW 3-Series drove an 18.6-mile route around the capital city that included side streets as well as highways. The car made left, right, and u-turns, changed lanes, passed other cars, and merged onto and off the highway.

Like Google, Baidu is making its own 3d maps

Those capabilities in themselves are nothing new for the field—Google and the major automakers working on the technology have no trouble there—but it’s a significant milestone for China, and proof that Baidu is a real contender in the race to build and deliver the fully revolutionary technology first.
The test also makes good on a promise Baidu and BMW made in June, to launch a self-driving car this year (though it’s a generous definition of the word “launch”). The company’s deep learning research lab has been working on this project since 2013.
Generally, there are two approaches to developing this technology: The automaker way is to take regular cars and slowly add in features, like the ability to drive itself on the highway. Google is going for the “moonshot,” straight to a car no human will ever drive, one that’s fully capable in every situation. Baidu says it’s taking a third way, “to advance incrementally through different environments, rather than through different levels of driving autonomy.” It’s working on fully autonomous vehicles that will be limited geographically, like a bus that drives the same route every day. Limiting the route limits the challenges the vehicle will face.
That kind of service depends on extremely detailed maps that include things like the precise location of lane markers and curbs, the height of traffic lights, and what every traffic sign says. The idea is that if that information is pre-loaded, the vehicle can focus its computing power and sensors on temporary obstacles—like pedestrians and other cars.
Like Google, Baidu is making its own maps. It says that “within five to ten years, the majority of China’s roadways could be mapped” to that level to detail.
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