"As the traffic ticket is received, will autonomous driving be far behind? The mass-produced King Long minibus will be launched in 2018. On the Baidu World Conference held in Beijing on November 16, Robin Li, Founder and CEO of Baidu, said in his keynote speech that the second-generation autonomous driving micro-cycle vehicle known as Apollong jointly developed by Baidu and King Long will be commercially mass-produced and put into operation in 2018.

Apollong is also China's first commercial autonomous driving micro-cycle vehicle. Its birth brings the achievement of cooperation between Baidu Apollo and King Long to a new level which will realize the new leap of public travel in the industry 4.0 era.

Li Zhenyu (General Manager of Baidu's Intelligent Driving Group), Wu Xuebin (Vice President of Baidu), Zhou Fangming (Executive Deputy General Manager of King Long), and Chen Weiqiang (Vice President of King Long Engineering Research Institute) attended the Baidu World Conference and solemnly released the second-generation autonomous driving micro-cycle vehicle in the intelligent driving sub-forum. In the release conference, Vice President Chen Weiqiang made a speech on the latest commercial autonomous driving and introduced the technical highlights of the second-generation autonomous driving micro-cycle vehicle in detail.

Birth of Apollong makes your childhood dream come true

In the release conference, Apollong's birth process was reviewed through a video clip. On the technical basis of the first-generation micro-cycle vehicle, with 50-day joint breakthrough from design, manufacturing to testing, the second-generation vehicle model of Apollong made its appearance in the expectation of all social circles.

Apollong's Formal Appearance in Baidu World Conference

Apollong looks super cute and lovely, with a small size and futuristic style of appearance. It is said that Apollong's style design concept is derived from the yellow duck. The yellow duck represents the childhood with a great longing for a bright future, while an autonomous driving vehicle is what many people dreamed in the future world in their childhood. Apollong's yellow duck style concept represents the childhood dream coming true. Furthermore, the adorable yellow duck style makes the high-tech of autonomous driving full of approachability and free of inaccessibility and remoteness.

Apollong's design also upends the traditional vehicle concept. Its new construction with electric, electronic and intelligent elements makes it the first prototype without steering wheel, accelerator pedal and brake pedal. Its body also uses new materials and processes such as the RTM lightweight composite material, monolithic curved glass, motor-operated doors, automatic barrier-free love passage.

Apollong's Interior Space

On the technical capability basis of the first-generation micro-cycle vehicle, Apollong has been developed with a commercial orientation to an autonomous driving level of L4 (Note: in highly autonomous driving, the autonomous driving system completes all driving operations). For the "last kilometer" commute, in the early implementation, it is planned to realize commercialization for specific scenarios like automatic shuttling among scenic spots, parks airports and others as well as carrying out specific service tasks through man-machine interaction. With the gradual resolution of technical, regulatory, infrastructure and cost issues, autonomous driving buses will be applied further to semi-closed areas and even open markets of road such as route, tourism and public transport.

The strongest "brain of intelligence" redefines autonomous driving micro-cycle vehicle

With 30-year experience in bus R&D and manufacturing as well as 20-year achievement accumulation in new energy bus R&D, King Long has applied its solid vehicle R&D capability and manufacturing platform to Apollong. In combination with Baidu Apollo's autonomous driving solution, King Long has strictly followed the mass production standard in carrying out the entire Apollong development process, including product concept design to definition, development, verification and final launching.

Speech from Chen Weiqiang, Vice President of King Long Engineering Research Institute 

Thanks to Baidu's "Apollo gene" and application of the R&D achievements of King Long King Wings Internet of Autonomous Driving Vehicles, Apollong has the strongest "brain of intelligence" that enables it to perfectly realize automatic driving shuttling function. Furthermore, system expansion applications and OTA software upgrading allow it to have more powerful functions. For example, it supports various automatic operation modes and meets the need of different operation scenarios such as public transport type operation (fixed route) and taxi mode (call with mobile phone's APP). Based on the DuerOS for Apollo, users can realize nearly 100 functions such as vehicle control, vehicle status inquiry, audio and video entertainment, information inquiry, living service and traffic condition inquiry through interaction with natural voice conversation. The vehicle also allows cloud operations management. Except driving, all other vehicle operations, remote dispatching, automatic dispatching and others can be completed on the platform or mobile phone's APP.

As China's first commercial autonomous driving micro-cycle vehicle, in addition to the actual operation capability in set scenarios, it is also considered to adapt to China's characteristic road conditions and emergency prediction and prevention by providing built-in multi-sensor combined sensing and multiple safety redundancy protection technology, in combination with high-precision Baidu Map to precisely guarantee driving safety.

Minor step in autonomous driving contributes to major step in public transport

Since Apollong was launched in April this year, King Long has become the only bus company among the first group of companies joining the Apollo Ecology. Both parties formally signed a technical cooperation agreement in July to work together in the development of autonomous driving ecology. Since then, both parties have effectively and practically promoted the implementation of autonomous driving technology in commercial vehicle field in China. From an autonomous driving bus designed based on Apollo 1.0 to the birth of Apollong as the first commercial autonomous driving micro-cycle vehicle in China, the forward-looking and pioneering strategic cooperation between both parties marks a milestone pace in the achievement of the dream of autonomous driving. Li Zhenyu, General Manager of Baidu's Intelligent Driving Group, expressed that the Apollo platform was moving towards product orientation, mass production orientation and solution orientation, making autonomous driving truly a part of daily life.

Zhou Fangming (Executive Deputy General Manager of King Long) Receiving Exclusive Interview by Jessi  Hempel, Chief Correspondent of Wired, a Well-known Journal in America

It needs a long time to explore for autonomous driving vehicles to truly become a mainstream means of transport. Baidu's Apollo open platform and King Long conducted operation of autonomous driving micro-cycle vehicles in set scenarios and this has set an example and benchmark for commercial implementation of autonomous driving vehicles in China. As said by Zhou Fangming, Executive Deputy General Manager of King Long, "There is still a long way to go for the future of autonomous driving. Today we and Baidu Apollo have taken a minor step toward the commercialization of autonomous driving, with a hope that this minor step will push the new public transport mode forward for a major step."

Source : www.chinabuses.org

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