Baidu unveils Pandora, a new multisensor fusion technology

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- On December 28, 2017, Baidu Apollo and Hesai, a Chinese lidar company, unveiled a developer suite for autonomous driving named Pandora which may accelerate the implementation of autonomous driving vehicles.

Briefly speaking, Pandora is a kind of developer suite of autonomous driving, integrating lidar, panoramic camera module, multisensor fusion, algorithm of perception and recognition. This is actually a new technology of multisensor fusion.

Different from the conventional "data fusion", a process of integrating multiple data sources seperately collected from different sensors, such as camera, lidar, ultrasonic radar, etc, Pandora implements "data fusion at the level of hardware". It means that sensors are integrated on the hardware stage at which data fusion takes place, and then data sources are collectively transferred to computing platform.

According to Hesai and Baidu Apollo, this design may solve various problems for developers of autonomous driving technologies. For example, it may enhance reliability of sensor's detection, simplify data synchronization, decrease calculation and reduce the complexity of sensor integration.

In the development of Pandora, Hesai is mainly responsible for the design and production of hardware. In the meantime, Baidu Apollo takes charge of the definition of overall system and the adaptability of algorithms.