Chinese internet giant Baidu
Previously, autonomous taxis could only operate from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m in the city. Baidu's updated robotaxi service is expected to cover one million customers in certain areas of Wuhan, a city of populated by over 10 million people.
"The model will enable autonomous vehicles to quickly make sense of an unseen object, such as special vehicle (fire truck, ambulance) recognition, plastic bag misdetection, and others," Baidu said regarding its self-driving service. "In addition, Baidu's autonomous driving perception model-a sub-model of the WenXin Big Model-leveraging more than 1 billion parameters, is able to dramatically improve the generalization potential of autonomous driving perception."
About a year ago, Baidu began charging payment for its robotaxi service known as "Apollo Go," which in turn led to the opening of further driverless robotaxi services. In the year 2023, Baidu hopes to incorporate another 200 robotaxis all over China.
Although Baidu has offered autonomous driving vehicles since August 2022, it hasn't yet provided an opportunity like this. In quarter 3 alone, Apollo Go recorded over 474,000 rides, which has gone up by 311%. As a whole, robotaxis are getting more renowned than they were before, particularly with being supported by authorities.
To top it off, Baidu and Pony.ai said that they would start to test 10 autonomous driving vehicles in a technology park that was established and put into place by the Beijing government. Over the past five years or so, China has emphasized driverless taxis especially since it is seeking to become more diverse.
Pony.ai also has operations in the United States in addition to China. Currently, Pony.ai, which is a competitor of Apollo Go, has been testing out driverless systems throughout China and the United States. Pony.ai will be testing out driverless taxi systems in California and Arizona, but with necessary precautions taken.
Other driving systems have also been experimenting with autonomous vehicles (such as Tesla
