Baidu teams up with Yinchuan to build demonstration roads for autonomous CV test

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- On December 22, Chinese Internet giant Baidu inked a framework agreement with the Yinchuan municipal government to jointly build demonstration test road for autonomous commercial vehicles and open road sections for multi-scenario autonomous driving.

Besides, both parties plan to deepen their collaboration in the fields of AI and transportation, helping Yinchuan develop into the next benchmark to China's deployment of building national strength in transportation.

Yinchuan is a freight transportation heavyweight where highway accounts for a great proportion of the city's annual freight transport volume, and also takes the leading in carrying out pilot projects about cutting-edge technologies like 5G. These are all boost for Yinchuan to put intelligent-connected commercial vehicles on roads in terms of application scenarios and infrastructures.

Under the agreement, Baidu Apollo will make the infrastructures of Yinchuan's highways more intelligent as part of efforts to develop a solution integrating autonomous vehicles, vehicle-infrastructure cooperative system and logistics chain. Moreover, the Internet giant will give Yinchuan’s local traffic management authority access to Baidu Map's transport cloud platform, and both parties have decided to deepen the collaboration on smart parking. 

As the world's biggest autonomous driving platform, Baidu Apollo launched the “5.5” version at the first Apollo Ecosystem Conference on December 18. Meanwhile, the ecosystem has been further expanded through the unveiling of two new platforms focusing on the vehicle infrastructure cooperative system and the smart vehicle connectivity respectively.

Hitherto, Baidu Apollo has received a total of 150 licenses for autonomous vehicle road tests, and conducted road tests in 23 cities with a range spanning over 3 million kilometers. What's more, the Apollo ecosystem has so far attracted 36,000 developers and 177 partners, and developed around 560,000 lines of open source code (photo source: Baidu's WeChat account).