Baidu, FAW set up united lab to provide mass-produced IoV products

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- FAW Car Co., Ltd. and Beijing Baidu Netcom Science Technology Co., Ltd inked an MoU (memorandum of understanding) on October 23 to jointly develop IoV (Internet of Vehicles) products and services, according to the automaker's announcement.

Under the MoU, both parties agreed to set up the Baidu-Besturn DuBest United Lab for Intelligent Connectivity to research the volume production of vehicle-mounted products, involving such areas as voice, semantics, image recognition as well as AR (augmented reality) navigation.

By sharing respective advantageous resources, the cooperation will help FAW Car enhance its overall marketing competence and further boost the products’ core quality for Baidu, said FAW Car.

The collaboration includes three major parts. Relying on Baidu's large ecosystem of technologies and services, FAW Car is to develop tailored IoV services for consumers. Besides, two companies intend to build an open IoV platform based on Baidu's IoV OS, a mass-produced and complete IoV operating system solution, and FAW Besturn's D-Life on-board intelligent-connected system. Moreover, they will jointly explore cutting-edge technologies focusing on Baidu's AI (artificial intelligence) capabilities.

The collaboration will be implemented in a 3-year cycle. The first cycle will run from 2018 to 2020.

FAW Group is one of Baidu's Apollo autonomous driving platform's strategic partners after they signed an agreement in July last year, which said both companies will develop in-depth cooperation on IoV products, autonomous driving technologies, brand promotion, innovation marketing and cloud services, etc. In addition, FAW Group and Baidu planned to provide users with one-stop in-vehicle services by integrating Baidu's intelligent-connected solutions like DuerOS and CarLife with the automaker's vehicle-mounted system. Both parties also had the wish to develop highly autonomous driving technologies.