Looking back on the history of autonomous driving for more than ten years, in the domestic market, autonomous driving has enjoyed a bright moment of financing exceeding 100 billion in a year, and also experienced a controversial moment when the industry was cold and business was hindered.
At present, the autonomous driving industry is shrouded in a “cold wave”, and dramas such as shrinking valuations, layoffs and bankruptcy continue to be staged in the autonomous driving market.
Under the “cold wave”, the enthusiasm for capital investment in the autonomous driving industry has dropped sharply.
Various unfavorable factors have added a lot of uncertainty to the future of autonomous driving, and at the same time brought many new changes to the development of the industry.
Behind the changes, it means the resetting of the market structure of “the capable go up and the weak go down”, and it also shows that the technical competition period of autonomous driving has passed, and the industry development stage has reached the period when the core technology is pursuing maturity and stability in the scene.
On the road of chasing commercial mass production, some companies have withdrawn sadly, and some companies have found the right time to overcome the difficulties of technology implementation.
As one of the top industrial media in the technology industry, Leifeng.com launched the 2022 “Flying to the Earth and Going to the Sea” annual technology list selection plan in October this year.
The 2022 “Flying into the Earth and Going to the Sea” annual technology list, formerly known as Leifeng.com’s annual “Best AI Nuggets Year-end List”, was founded in 2016, and has gone through six selections, with a total of more than 2,000 registered technology companies . In 2022, the list will be fully upgraded and renamed the 2022 “Flying into the Earth and Going to the Sea” Annual Science and Technology List, hoping to find out those products and companies with the most vitality from a more professional and rich dimension.
For this reason, in the past few months, Leifeng.com has considered artificial intelligence, urban IoT AIoT, industrial intelligent manufacturing, automotive technology, enterprise services, commercial robots, Future interaction, consumer electronics, chips, medical AI and digitalization, cloud and data infrastructure, 12 vertical fields, looking for pioneers and evangelists of the new business order. A total of 49 companies won awards in this selection.
Among them, in the field of “autonomous driving”, three companies, Kuwa Technology, Pony.ai, and Meituan, stood out and won the “Benchmarking Award for Mass Production of Autonomous Driving”, “Benchmarking Award for Smart Driving Heavy Trucks”, and “Benchmarking Award for Unmanned Delivery Robots” .
Mass Production Autonomous Driving Benchmark Award: Kuwa Technology
Kuwa Technology, established in 2015, is one of the first companies to achieve commercialization on the domestic autonomous driving track, and it is also one of the few companies in the track that has achieved a growth rate of more than 3 times in commercial volume per year.
As a hard technology company, Kuwa Technology is committed to providing a full-stack solution for autonomous driving in urban open scenarios. Its products cover the three major areas of municipal sanitation, urban distribution logistics, and urban travel, and form a serialized product matrix.
At the beginning of its establishment, Kuwa Technology emphasized that business + technology should walk on two legs. The technology should be a full-stack solution, and it should be oriented to the dynamic scene of urban open roads, and it has formulated a commercialization path for different scenarios.
From a technical point of view, Kuwa Technology currently has a R&D team of more than 1,000 people, and has multiple R&D and production centers. The operation or test operation has covered many urban areas such as Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Anhui. Core technologies such as recognition algorithm, high-precision map and intelligent network connection, decision-making and planning, service-oriented control architecture, and industry-oriented overall machine structure design capabilities. In the past two years, with the establishment of a business-data-algorithm closed loop, Kuwa Technology has accelerated the speed of technology update iterations.
On the road of mass production of autonomous driving, Kuwa Technology has also been at the forefront.
In the field of smart sanitation, Kuwa Technology has carried out normal self-driving cleaning operation services in more than 20 important prefecture-level cities across the country. At the same time, it has provided a variety of smart city functional services for many cities. Thousands of units.
In the field of logistics, Kuwa Technology has accelerated the speed of commercialization, and the self-driving city distribution vehicle is undergoing closed-loop testing in express delivery and manufacturing transshipment.
Kuwa Technology currently has reached in-depth cooperation with Chery, BAIC, Shaanxi Automobile and other OEMs to jointly develop and empower the development of autonomous driving.
Smart Driving Heavy Truck Landing Benchmark Award: Pony.ai
Pony.ai was established at the end of 2016. It was co-founded by Peng Jun, the former chief architect of Baidu’s autonomous driving department, and Lou Tiancheng, who is recognized by the industry as “the first person in China’s programming”. A group of venture capital institutions, with a cumulative financing amount of more than 1.1 billion US dollars, has become the most highly valued self-driving unicorn in China.
Pony.ai is a pioneer in domestic passenger car autonomous driving solutions. As early as December 2018, it was the first to launch the autonomous driving travel service (Robotaxi), and obtained qualifications or licenses for autonomous driving testing and operation in many places around the world. Beijing, Guangzhou and other cities have started the unmanned test of the main driver “remove the safety officer”, and are gradually expanding the test scope, time period and vehicle scale.
In 2018, Pony.ai began to develop self-driving heavy trucks. Relying on the experience accumulated in the passenger car business and the advantages of software and hardware, Pony.ai was able to accelerate the commercialization of self-driving heavy-duty trucks.
In terms of Robotruck, Pony.ai, Sany Group, and Sinotrans established a strategic alliance to jointly create a golden triangle of “technology + vehicle + scene” for smart logistics. During the cooperation process, Pony.ai made customized changes in the autonomous driving technology in response to the special needs of the logistics industry, such as participating in the remote control transformation, and built a digital system connected to the fleet management system for smart heavy trucks.
In November last year, Pony.ai officially released the third-generation self-driving truck software and hardware integration system for mainline logistics. In addition, Pony.ai completed the mass production delivery of the first batch of 30 smart heavy trucks.
Pony.ai will continue to further optimize products and application scenarios, and strive to achieve truly large-scale mass production in 2024, and reach sales of more than 10,000 units in the future.
Unmanned Delivery Robot Benchmark Award: Meituan
Meituan, as a technology retail company, has continued to promote digital upgrades since its establishment, showing great potential and strength in the market, and eventually grew into a powerful Internet company.
In recent years, the unmanned delivery business has become a trend, and the unmanned delivery network has gradually become large-scale, and products such as unmanned delivery robots and unmanned delivery machines have emerged as the times require.
As the pioneer of the unmanned delivery track, Meituan entered the game as early as 2016 and has been leading the track so far.
In 2016, Meituan started research on projects related to automatic distribution, and formed a team to start research on automatic distribution business in specific scenarios. Two years later, Meituan’s automatic distribution vehicles started test operations in many places. In the past three years of the epidemic, Meituan’s unmanned delivery vehicles played a great role in logistics scheduling due to their “non-contact” nature.
Meituan’s automatic delivery is based on Meituan’s rich offline scenarios. By combining with the existing complex delivery process, it builds a logistics road network based on technologies such as intelligent dispatching systems, drones, and automatic driving. It is a variety of human-machine collaborative terminal delivery. Models, various forms of intelligent distribution terminals, etc., form an overall solution for Meituan’s automatic distribution.
At present, Meituan continues to increase its R&D investment in the automatic distribution business. In December 2022, the Meituan Robot Research Institute was officially established to be responsible for Meituan’s research and development in the field of robotics.
From the product point of view, Meituan’s unmanned delivery robot has L4 level automatic driving capability. Through built-in multi-beam laser radar, vision sensor, ultrasonic system and GPS and other high-precision sensors, it realizes autonomous path planning with a series of built-in efficient algorithms. Autonomous obstacle avoidance function. In terms of specific operating capabilities, Meituan’s unmanned delivery robots can run freely on complex outdoor roads and flat indoors, and can also pass through steps smoothly.
In the future, with the continuous investment in research and development, Meituan’s unmanned delivery robots can achieve the goal of cost control of less than 10,000 yuan.
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