Article | Intelligent Relativity, Author | Chen Xuanbin

I don't know when it started, but autonomous driving seems to have suddenly ‘awakened’, and began to frequently ‘appear’ on the scene of international events, becoming an important means for major organisers, technology vendors and even countries to demonstrate their scientific and technological innovation capabilities.

Before and after the Tokyo Olympics, Toyota's autonomous driving successfully entered the international field of vision through this event. Toyota not only provided a large number of self-driving vehicles for the Tokyo Olympics to be used in the event, but also started the commercial operation of L4 self-driving vehicles in Tokyo Odaiba.

When the time comes to the Beijing Winter Olympics, autonomous driving is in full bloom in China's venue for multi-dimensional applications. The most notable was Baidu Apollo's car robot, which successfully completed an 800-metre torch relay as a torchbearer. Immediately after, the self-driving products of manufacturers such as Meituan, New Stone, Smart Walker, Ubiquiti, Nine Company, and BAIC Group all landed in Beijing Shougang Park one after another, assuming a series of services such as pick-up, food delivery, security, and cleaning.

Similarly, the Boao Forum, which has already been held this year, and the Hangzhou Asian Games, which has been postponed, have coincidentally taken the display of self-driving technology and services as the focus of their activities, and well-known domestic technology vendors such as Wenyuan Zhixing and Geely Automobile have also seized the opportunity to go onto the international stage, cooperating with the event organisers and accelerating the landing of their own self-driving technology solutions.

So, behind this phenomenon, for the automatic driving, this is a ‘fixed-point force’ pre-training, or a ‘pure show of muscle’ Muscle Show, and now frequently ‘appearing’ in international events, and will bring what for the development of automatic driving? What will it bring to the development of autonomous driving?

01 Autonomous Driving, Continuing the 'Enclosure Movement'

Before full commercial application, autonomous driving often needs to undergo a large number of road tests to meet commercial requirements. Regardless of whether it is simulation training in a closed field or fixed-point training on an open road, autonomous driving is basically still being tested in an area with clear boundaries.

For autonomous driving, such a development mode is like a gradual ‘enclosure movement’, which starts with a specific scene area, then advances to the periphery step by step, and then expands to the whole scene of the city.

Looking back at Changsha's intelligent networked vehicle industry development history, this vein is even clearer.

In 2016, Changsha began to build the national intelligent networked vehicle (Changsha) test area, and in 2018, it was put into use, mainly providing closed test scenarios for major automated driving manufacturers and various types of automated driving vehicles, such as urban simulation test area, high-speed simulation test area, countryside simulation test area, cross-country simulation test area, etc. In 2019, Changsha launched the ‘intelligent networked vehicle’ test area, which is the first of its kind in the city.

In 2019, Changsha launched the construction of ‘two 100’ projects, namely ‘100 km of intelligent high-speed’ and ‘100 square kilometres of city-wide open roads’, which will enable the city to enter into the city level of autonomous driving in Changsha. As a result, autonomous driving in Changsha has entered the city-level and regional-level open road testing phase. Subsequently, the total mileage of the test road was gradually increased to 175 kilometres, covering both urban and intercity areas.

During this process, Baidu's self-driving travel service platform, Radish Express, conducted trial operations within the open road end of Changsha, gradually covering the 135 km of open roads in Changsha from the initial 50 km, opening up the regional scope step by step. And now Radish Express has begun issuing self-driving travel services in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Wuhan and other cities.

Similarly, Guangzhou's automatic driving test area is also showing a trend of gradual opening, and so far it has covered six urban areas, namely Baiyun, Haizhu, Panyu, Huangpu, Huadu, and Nansha, with a total of 202 (segments) of first-, second-, and third-tier test roads opened for use by Wenyuan Zhixing, Pony Smart, and other well-known automatic driving vendors for carrying passengers and goods for test and training purposes.

The reason for this situation is that, on the one hand, there is a certain degree of danger inherent in autonomous driving, and the division and restriction of specific test areas facilitates management, ensures the personal safety of the urban population as much as possible, and meets the realistic test environment needed for autonomous driving.

On the other hand, most of the domestic automatic driving manufacturers favour the ‘vehicle and road co-operation’ mode, there is a very key technical prerequisite - the intelligent transformation of the road and the communication infrastructure, thus forming a synergy between the vehicle and the traffic network system, in order to further achieve the effect of automatic driving. In order to further realise the effect of automatic driving.

Thus, for the current automatic driving, no matter from the administrative point of view or from the point of view of technology development, the best mode is basically to ‘circle’ in a specific area for testing, training and iterative upgrading.

02 Another 'New Infrastructure'

From a technical point of view, this ‘enclosure movement’ is even more necessary for the development of the ‘vehicle-road collaboration’ mode of autonomous driving.

In the next development path of autonomous driving, the transformation and support of the roadside will only become more and more important. With the downward development of autonomous driving, the ‘perception limitations’ exposed by single-vehicle intelligence are becoming more and more obvious, which further pushes technology vendors and local governments to seek optimisation ideas from the ‘vehicle-road synergy’ mode.

Compared with single-vehicle intelligence, vehicle-road cooperation mode, through the transformation and upgrading of the roadside, can often achieve ultra-vision distance and more accurate perception and identification, so as to ensure the safety level of vehicle travelling.

At present, the key scenes such as urban intersections or highways, through the installation of LiDAR and other roadside sensing equipment, the full-dimensional restoration of the roadway scene and real-time monitoring is achieved, which effectively improves the traffic management efficiency of a specific roadway.

Then, once the information identified by these road-side sensing is fed back to the vehicle side, the automatic driving will be able to make a good safety feedback to ensure normal driving. This is where the application of vehicle-circuit coordination is advantageous.

However, such a path also means more investment, especially the intelligent transformation of the road end and the laying out of communication infrastructure, which is mostly indispensable.

During the Winter Olympics, in order to fully ensure the efficient and safe service of automatic driving, China Unicom deployed a total of 17 5G base stations, 1 Beidou ground-based enhancement station, 30 5G roadside terminals, 20 C-V2X roadside unit RSUs, 55 roadside edge processing units, 40 cameras, 15 microwave radars, and 3 LeiVision all-in-one machines in Shougang Park, which basically covered the entire Shougang Park's This is a perfect demonstration of automatic driving technology that will amaze the world.

In this way, the development of autonomous driving under the ‘vehicle-circuit coordination’ mode will inevitably involve a necessary infrastructure construction.

And such a path, to a certain extent, will inevitably limit the driving range of automatic driving can only stay in the already open and intelligent transformation of the road, and at the same time, due to the infrastructure construction associated with a wider range of overall than the single-vehicle intelligence is much slower than the development of automatic driving will be slowed down, and can only be followed by the upgrading of the road end of the gradual unfolding of the road.

03 Building roads, not just a technical problem

To develop autonomous driving, ‘road construction’ is an essential technical project, but it is not just a technical problem.

Of course, this is still a technical problem.

"To build roads, the first thing to build is the technical channel for data transmission. Here, as far as communication technology is concerned, at present, China and the United States have basically clarified the technical route of C-V2X as a directly connected communication technology for vehicle-road co-operation. Despite the great attention, it still can't change the dilemma that C-V2X is in the early stage of development, such as imperfect construction, unclear standards, and high cost.

Today, China is vigorously promoting the development of C-V2X standards, and recently released three new C-V2X standards, respectively, for the ‘C-V2X scale test data interface specification’, ‘Vehicle-Road Collaboration Roadside Sensing System Technical Requirements and Test Methods’, "LTE-based Vehicle Networking wireless communication technology without GNSS signals under the conditions of the direct connection communication positioning synchronisation technical requirements and test methods ".

At the same time, the State Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also in the ‘14th Five-Year Plan’ Information and Communication Industry Development Plan clearly pointed out that by 2025, the key highways and urban roads to achieve C-V2X scale coverage. On the market side, Huawei, ZTE, Baidu, high-emerging technology-related vendors are also continuing to follow up to promote the development and application of C-V2X communication modules.

The comprehensive path of technology such as these is crucial for the development of China's autonomous driving industry.

Furthermore, it is also an engineering problem.

Road repair as an infrastructure type of project, associated with a wide range of construction difficulties are far more complex than single-vehicle intelligence. For the existing urban road how to repair, who to repair, who to operate after repair, how to operate the rights and responsibilities of a series of problems are plagued by the development of automatic driving is generally difficult.

At present, Changsha is forming the ‘iron triangle’ model of ‘government + state-owned platform + ecological enterprises’ is trying to answer this question. In other words, a state-owned enterprise platform (such as Xiangjiang Intelligence in Changsha, Hunan Province) has been set up between the local government and autonomous driving eco-enterprises, which is fully responsible for infrastructure construction and demonstration scenario operation, etc. However, this is only for Changsha.

However, this is only a model for Changsha. Previously, some cities have given similar infrastructure projects to self-driving manufacturers, and Baidu Apollo has won bids for new infrastructure projects in cities such as Guangzhou, Chongqing and Hefei.

Both different models are currently in the validation phase. This project should ultimately be handed over to what kind of market entity to operate, and ultimately perhaps the results of the current practice.

Concluding Remarks

Overall, with the maturity of autonomous driving technology and the opening up of policies, autonomous driving applications have the ability to extend to more cities and scenarios.

International events such as the Olympic Games and Boao Forum have extremely high requirements for participating autonomous driving companies, and being able to participate in them is not only a reflection of technical strength, but also attracts global attention and traffic. For some autonomous driving startups, this is precisely the way to get the attention of the capital market, while for mature companies it is also a rare opportunity to use technology to serve the community.

In addition, from the perspective of ‘vehicle-road co-operation’ mode, the specific area divided by the international event has a natural basic advantage for the demonstration of autonomous driving, and it is also a rare test scenario - autonomous driving manufacturers can test their products and services in a specific and more complex and regulated real-world environment. It is also a rare testing scenario - autonomous driving manufacturers can verify the full range of autonomous driving technology again and again in a specific, complex and regulated real-world environment.

At present, there is still a long way to go before automatic driving is fully commercialised. The ‘enclosure movement’ of automatic driving will continue, and it is more important to collaborate to complete the policy breakthrough during this period.

Before that, it is also an attempt to explore the future commercialisation of autonomous driving by giving it a good show in the most popular demonstration zones (i.e. the venues of major international events)!

This article is reprinted from Titanium Media, article: intelligent relativity, by Chen Xuanbin.
First image credit @Visual China
Original Link: When is the self-driving “rodeo” over? -Titanium Media Official Website (tmtpost.com)