This Company Just Introduces Its New Robotaxi Service

China’s giant search engine Baidu just introduced its new robotaxi service with a fleet of 45 autonomous vehicles. The company’s plan is to let these cars run on 50-kilometer open roads before expanding the service to Changsha, the capital of Hunan. This is going to be the biggest pilot site of 70 square kilometers for this type of service.

Li Zhenyu, Baidu’s vice president and robotaxi project’s general manager said that, the testing activities in Changsha will prove the operability of Apolloaxi robot and help create a stepping stone for this service to official launch on the market. Though the piloting program, the project is eager to receive opinions from users to further improve the service.

Hongqi electric vehicles, which is a model developed by Baidu and FAW Group, will be used for this service. To ensure safety as well as follow the regulations of the government, there will still be a human operator inside each vehicle.

The project comes when Chinese cities are competing in the race of bringing the futuristic mobility service with high operational efficiency and low cost.

Similar projects have been launched in other regions across the country. Earlier, both Chuxing and AutoX announced that they were looking to launch a self-driving taxi service in Shanghai at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020.

Pony.ai and WeRide, two self-driving car startups based in China, have also been providing robotaxi services around their facilities for the past few years.

The idea of a driverless future is one the key factors in the field of artificial intelligence and has drawn in major investments globally. This is the field where both the US and China are seeking supremacy.

China expects that around 90% of the country’s motorways in big cities will support vehicle-to-vehicle as well as vehicle-to-infrastructure communications by the year 2020. Self-driving car sensors will gather info and then send the data to a cloud computing platform or an on-board computer on the car for instant decisions.