Baidu gains China’s first batch of T4 licenses for autonomous car road tests

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Chinese Internet giant Baidu announced on July 1 that it has been granted five T4 licenses for autonomous driving road tests by regulators in Beijing.

License plates used on the self-driving road tests in Beijing have five levels—from T1 to T5. The highest level that has been issued so far is T4 and Baidu was the first reaper.

(Photo source: Baidu's WeChat account)

A vehicle granted the T4 license plate should possess the capability to perform autonomous driving actions under complex urban road conditions. For instance, the tested vehicle is required to smoothly pass tunnels and schools and cope with scenarios such as pedestrian violations and the detour around a construction site. Besides, the vehicle should be able to recognize a number of particular traffic signals and markings like reversible lane, left-turn waiting zone as well as temporary traffic lights.

In addition, the car must be able to conduct overtaking, hill start and parking on a ramp. 

Last month, Baidu announced the level 4 autonomous driving vision-based closed-loop solution designed for urban roads, the Apollo Lite, at the CVPR 2019 (the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition).

According to Wang Liang, head of Baidu Apollo Technical Committees, the Apollo Lite is so far China's only level 4 (fully autonomous driving) urban road-specific vision-based sensing solution that can process a huge amount of data generated by 10 cameras at a speed of 200 frames per second. The maximum frame drop for each camera is under 5‰. Using the solution, vehicular sensors are able to achieve the 360-degree in-time environment perception and extend its head-on detection range as far as 240 meters.

Based on the previous technical R&D and the iteration of road tests for the first half of 2019, the new sensing system that is composed of 10 cameras will help Baidu's vehicles to conduct the end-to-end closed-loop autonomous driving on urban roads sans high-beam rotatable lidar, said Wang Liang.

Baidu revealed that the Apollo Lite has been tested on multiple road sections in Beijing and reached the world-leading level in terms of number of vehicles tested, cumulative testing mileage and vehicle's performance in closed-loop autonomous driving on urban roads.