Baidu announces Apollo 1.5, more partners

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- At Baidu AI Developer Conference, held on July 5 in Beijing , Lu Qi, chief operating officer of Baidu, announced the overall technical framework of Apollo’s core technology and its opening plan. At that time, Baidu officially said to open its autonomous driving technology to third parties and announced its open-source autonomous driving software, Apollo 1.0. Lu said Apollo will be updated every two months. As said, two months later, Baidu announced Apollo 1.5 on Sept. 20.

According to Baidu, Apollo 1.5, the new edition, gives access to more functions such as obstacle perception, decision-making planning, cloud simulation, high-precision map service and end-to-end deep learning. The first four functions are accessible for the first time. And also, Apollo 1.5 supports driving in the same lane day and night. It cannot only perceive obstacles at night, but can also perceive obstacles under some atypical traffic scenes.

Jingao Wang, head of Apollo platform development, said since AI developer conference, Apollo has been keeping updating codes, at least ten times a week. During the past two months, they have added about 65,000 lines of codes. As to the new functions, high-precision map and cloud simulation are important ones.

What’s more, Biadu also made public other progress of Apollo plan, including Apollo fund and new partners. In July, Baidu and Yangtze River Industry Fund established Apollo fund. It is said that Apollo fund has been raising money and are expected to raise 10 billion yuan in three years. The money will be invested on more than 100 autonomous driving programs.

Yesterday the internet giant in China also added another 17 new members to its partner list, including Hyundai Motor, Lifan Motor, eHai Car Services and BDStar Navigation.