China holds autonomous driving test to promote adoption

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- As a part of the first Smart China Expo, i-Vista Grand Challenge has been held in Chongqing in the past week as a high-level global autonomous driving contest. Spanning from Aug. 18 to Aug. 25, the contest consisted of five challenges and made full use of the city’s distinctive geographic, climate features and complex road conditions to promote the utilization, commercialization and industrialization of autonomous driving technology.

The total sum of the contest prize will be up to RMB 7 million and about 35 contestants from enterprises and universities attended the competition, including Changan Auto, Geely Auto, JAC, Beiqi Foton Motor, Sun Yat-sen University.

i-Vista Grand Challenge was composed of 5 parts, namely AEB Challenge, APS Challenge, Self-driving in Urban Transport Challenge, Self-driving Innovative Application Challenge and Self-driving Commercialization Challenge. All vehicles should be equipped with a safety driver who is not allowed to interfere with the vehicle’s autonomous driving. The driving mode was subject to real-time monitoring and referee cars followed the contestant vehicles.

AEB Challenge tested the contestant vehicle’s response to a standing vehicle on its way when the vehicle was at a speed of 10-50km per hour as well as its response to a standing person when the vehicle was at a speed of 20-40km per hour. The contestant vehicle should undergo parallel parking, vertical parking and angle parking in APS Contest.

Self-driving in Urban Transport Challenge and Self-driving Innovative Application Challenge included kinds of road conditions to test the vehicle’s ability to deal with typical city road conditions, natural roads and complex scenarios, such as intersections, road work, bridge, dirt road.

Apart from technologies, the Grand Challenge also took contestants’ commercialization into account. In Self-driving Commercialization Challenge, the vehicle should run for 1.5km on open roads without any artificial scenarios in order to test the autonomous vehicle on real-life and simple roads.

Xie Fei, Deputy General Manager of CAERI, said in an interview that i-VISTA Grand Challenge, expected to be the World Cup in autonomous driving segment, aims to attract global automakers, research institutes, universities and technology companies to promote the development in autonomous driving segment as a global platform.

i-VISTA, namely Intelligent Vehicle Integrated Systems Test Area, is a global-leading model engineering of intelligent vehicle and intelligent traffic application, as well as a public service platform for product engineering.

The platform is committed to building virtual simulation test environment, lab test environment, closed and semi-closed road test environment and open road test environment for the sensors, systems, complete vehicles to be applied in ADAS, V2X, autonomous driving, intelligent transportation to meet the requirements in safety, comfort, energy saving, transportation management, infotainment. Constructed by China Automotive Engineering Research Institute (CAERI), i-Vista is to support the technology standard study, experimental verification, test certification, application demonstration and product engineering of intelligent connected vehicle and intelligent transportation system in China.