Beijing (Gasgoo)- Chinese autonomous driving solution developer Pony.ai announced on March 23 the strategic partnership with Chinese food delivery giant Meituan to jointly promote the commercial application of autonomous driving technology in the goods delivery industry.
Photo credit: Pony.ai
Through the collaboration, Pony.ai will tailor an automotive-grade autonomous driving domain controller for Meituan's autonomous delivery business to facilitate the rapid scaling of Meituan's autonomous delivery operations. The domain controller has already begun small-scale delivery and the scale will expand to 10,000 units by 2024.
Meituan has been laying out in the autonomous delivery field since 2016. Since 2020, its autonomous delivery vehicles have entered the normalized trial operation in many cities including Beijing and Shenzhen, with over 500 operational vehicles and more than 98% of the driving distance enabled by autonomous driving system. The vehicles can handle complex urban traffic scenarios including closed parks and open roads all-day round.
As of the end of 2022, Meituan's autonomous delivery vehicles have delivered over 2.77 million orders to customers.
The domain controller custom-made for Meituan is built on dual NVIDIA DRIVE Orin system-level chips, adopting liquid cooling technology, and strictly complying to vehicle production requirements to improve the driving performance of Meituan's latest generation of autonomous delivery vehicles.
Meituan plans to deploy its autonomous delivery services to food delivery, grocery shopping, flash sales, and other business scenarios in cities including Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen over the next three years.
