Baidu’s forays into automated vehicles will get a luxury sheen thanks to a just-announced R&D partnership with BMW.
The Chinese search giant tells Tech in Asia that it will work with the Munich-based automaker to develop a highly automated driving (HAD) car specifically for the Chinese market, which makes use of Baidu’s 3D mapping technology. The two firms also said they expect to release a working prototype of a vehicle within the next three years, though Baidu emphasizes that the partnership won’t necessarily yield a product for commercial release.
A HAD car is not a driverless vehicle. Instead, HAD brings some limited features that don’t require input from the driver, such as automatic parking or highway cruising. BMW released a prototype highly automated car at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, and today’s announcement heralds the start of the Chinese iteration of that project.
“This is actually an intelligent assistant collecting data from road situations and then operating locally,” Kai Yu of Baidu’s Deep Institute of Learning told TNW in a July interview regarding its . “We don’t call this a driverless car.”
It’s not clear if this partnership will help produce a “Baidu Car” in ten years, or if it merely represents BMW’s interest in China as a market for its own vehicles of the future.
Baidu is flexing its muscles in data analysis and artificial intelligence in other verticals besides automobiles. Earlier this month it unveiled a working prototype of Baidu Eye, a headband not dissimilar to Google Glass that identifies objects within one’s field of vision. At its Institute of Deep Learning in California, the company maintains a staff that works full time on machine learning, data analysis, and artificial intelligence.
Editing by Steven Millward
Stay updated on the go with our mobile app.
Get latest insights with smoother, more personalized experience through TIA mobile app.
