It is no secret that self-driving cars are something that companies such as Google are working on, and for the most part it almost looks like Western companies are the only ones who have attempted such vehicles. However as you might recall, China’s Baidu expressed similar interest of their own last year.Recently it would also seem that the company has been successfully testing their vehicles because according to the latest announcement from the company, it seems that Baidu’s self-driving car has successfully completed its full driverless test. The vehicle managed to travel almost 19 miles from the company’s headquarters in Beijing without the need for its human driver to intervene.
According to Baidu’s SVP of its Autonomous Driving Unit Wang Jing, he seemed to be pretty chuffed at the vehicle’s capabilities especially when considering China’s traffic situation, which safe to say is a lot more chaotic than most people would have anticipated. “Fully autonomous driving under mixed road conditions is universally challenging, with complexity further heightened by Beijing’s road conditions and unpredictable driver behavior.”
Baidu’s self-driving cars uses the BMW 3-series and are loaded with the company’s self-driving system called “AutoBrain”. This system allows the vehicle to identify objects and also brings about environmental perception to detect other vehicles, obstacles, and road lanes. While this is no doubt a success for Baidu, we reckon it will still be a while before these self-driving vehicles are available for purchase by the masses.
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