There are three major challenges in driving unmanned on the road.

Unmanned driving is no longer far away from us.

Just during the World Internet Conference, which was just closed, Baidu driverless cars carried passengers on the road for the first time. More than 200 guests experienced the test of driverless cars on the 3.16-kilometer-long urban open road in Wuzhen, Zhejiang.

Commercialized within 3 years and mass production within 5 years, Baidu announced its ambitions in the field of unmanned vehicles. Wang Jin, senior vice president of Baidu and general manager of the autonomous driving division, does not believe that this goal is out of touch with reality.

In addition to Baidu, there are 18 auto giants and Internet companies around the world who are aggressively entering the industry, including Google, Apple, Uber, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, Ford... all of them hope to seize market opportunities by 2021. .

However, what challenges do we face in order to make unmanned vehicles truly on the road?

How to be safer than human driving

"Our goal is to make unmanned vehicles better than the best human drivers." Wang Jin stressed in response to reporters' questions. There is no doubt that safety is the decisive factor in whether the public can accept unmanned vehicles. As one of the first passengers, China Youth Daily·China Youth Online reporter experienced the Baidu unmanned vehicle in Wuzhen.

In a short period of more than three minutes, the driverless car smashed the red light at the intersection, the vehicle near the right front, and the retrograde electric car that "flashed" not far away. For these small situations, the driverless car can respond in time, the steering wheel slowly rotates from time to time, and is controlled by an invisible handle. Whether it is changing lanes or turning heads, driving is always smoother.

However, compared to the complex and varied real scene, Wuzhen's test ride experience is more like an exercise. On selected roads, there are fewer vehicles and people, and each unmanned vehicle is equipped with a driver to escort. In the driver's seat, the driver's hands are always hung on the steering wheel, ready for manual intervention to deal with emergencies. On a particular model, the driver even needs to manually whistle to warn other social vehicles.

Obviously, if Wang Jin said, "Let the safety performance of unmanned vehicles reach 100 times that of human drivers," we still have a long way to go.

According to a test report submitted by Google in January this year, its driverless cars suffered a total of 272 accidents and must be handed over from the unmanned state to the human driver for control. If there is no manual intervention, 13 accidents may occur. In fact, in March of this year, Google’s unmanned vehicle crashed into a bus because of a mistake. In July, a Tesla sedan in the United States collided with a truck during autonomous driving, causing the driver to die, sparking a discussion about the safety of unmanned vehicles.

According to a Baidu engineer, Baidu unmanned vehicles have been able to distinguish between different obstacles, but they are not 100% accurate. Its identification rate of traffic lights reaches 99%, pedestrians reach 95%, but the accuracy of identifying vehicles is only 90%. In addition, although Baidu unmanned vehicles have passed the highway and urban road tests, they are not enough to cope with more complicated road conditions and lack of high-precision maps for automatic driving.

"The most advanced of unmanned vehicles is the ability to learn." Wang Jin believes that every time the road runs, every manual intervention, the unmanned vehicle is learning human driving experience. Moreover, a car has made progress through learning, and all cars will progress at the same time. Over time, big data will make unmanned cars smarter.

Baidu has not announced the number of kilometers traveled by the test vehicle. However, in the United States, Google's unmanned vehicles have ran more than 3 million kilometers, equivalent to the total number of miles of a single human driver for 300 years. With the improvement of unmanned vehicle technology and the speed of testing, its driving experience is expected to be more abundant than humans.

"One day, driverless technology will eventually mature, better than human driving." Google Unmanned Vehicles Project Director Chris Amossen firmly believes.

Cost is a short board for mass production

Unmanned vehicles can't be put into mass production. Besides the safety is still not guaranteed, the high production cost is another major constraint.

An unmanned vehicle must rely on a sensing device to enter surrounding information, just like the driver's eyes. According to the staff, Baidu unmanned vehicles have a total of 8 most important "eyes", of which the highest cost is the 360-degree rotating cylinder of the roof, which is a 64-line laser radar, which can detect within 120 meters. obstacle.

Many companies, including Google, have adopted the same laser radar. This year, the price of the device was as high as 500,000 yuan, even exceeding the cost of Baidu's purchase of domestically produced vehicles.

"The biggest problem at present is that only one company in the world can produce this kind of laser radar." Wang Jin said. However, he said, Baidu and Ford jointly invested in the company, called Velodyne, and asked it to reduce the price of the laser radar to $500 within five years.

Wang Jin believes that the current high price of 64-line laser radar is not because of high cost, but because of low production and low sales. Together with research and development costs and company profits, the price is high. He said that the company is working hard to expand production, and the production cost of unmanned vehicles will be greatly reduced in the next few years.

Unmanned car legislation lags behind

In order to make unmanned vehicles on the road on a large scale, clear laws and regulations and accident liability judgments are also indispensable. However, in the face of this new thing, the formulation of national laws and regulations still lags behind the development of technology.

The Tesla car accident has sounded the alarm. Who is the responsible subject once a similar car accident occurs? Is it a car manufacturer, a car owner, or a driverless system provider?

Wang Jin told China Youth Daily and Zhongqing Online reporter that "Baidu is positioning itself as a provider of unmanned vehicles." He explained that once an accident occurs, the responsible party is Baidu, not a car manufacturer, thus avoiding responsibility. Unclear.

In September of this year, the State of California signed a bill allowing autopilot vehicles to be tested on the highway in a “cab without supervision”. During the same period, the US Department of Transportation issued a 114-page legal guidance for driverless cars, listing 15 “safety assessment” standards that unmanned vehicle manufacturers are required to submit, including how driverless programs comply with current traffic regulations. Wait. However, these regulations do not clarify the responsibility for liability after a traffic accident.

At the two sessions this year, Li Shufu, member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and Chairman of the Geely Group, submitted a proposal to speed up the automatic driving legislation.

Baidu founder Li Yanhong also proposed to revise and improve the unmanned driving laws and regulations as soon as possible to provide institutional guarantee for the development, testing and commercial application of driverless cars.

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