Elon Musk famously stated any firm counting on lidar is “doomed.” Tesla as a substitute believes automated driving features are constructed on visible recognition and is even working to take away the radar. China’s Xpeng begs to differ.
Founded in 2014, Xpeng is one in every of China’s most celebrated electrical car startups and went public when it was simply six years outdated. Like Tesla, Xpeng sees automation as an integral a part of its technique; in contrast to the American big, Xpeng makes use of a mixture of radar, cameras, high-precision maps powered by Alibaba, localization methods developed in-house, and most just lately, lidar to detect and predict street situations.
“Lidar will provide the 3D drivable space and precise depth estimation to small moving obstacles even like kids and pets, and obviously, other pedestrians and the motorbikes which are a nightmare for anybody who’s working on driving,” Xinzhou Wu, who oversees Xpeng’s autonomous driving R&D middle, stated in an interview with TechCrunch.
“On top of that, we have the usual radar which gives you location and speed. Then you have the camera which has very rich, basic semantic information.”
Xpeng is including lidar to its mass-produced EV mannequin P5, which can start delivering in the second half of this 12 months. The automotive, a household sedan, will later have the opportunity to drive from level A to B based mostly on a navigation route set by the driver on highways and sure city roads in China which can be coated by Alibaba’s maps. An older mannequin with out lidar already permits assisted driving on highways.
The system, known as Navigation Guided Pilot, is benchmarked in opposition to Tesla’s Navigate On Autopilot, stated Wu. It can, for instance, robotically change lanes, enter or exit ramps, overtake different automobiles, and maneuver one other automotive’s sudden cut-in, a typical sight in China’s advanced street situations.
“The city is super hard compared to the highway but with lidar and precise perception capability, we will have essentially three layers of redundancy for sensing,” stated Wu.
By definition, NGP is a complicated driver-assistance system (ADAS) as drivers nonetheless want to maintain their palms on the wheel and take management at any time (Chinese legal guidelines don’t permit drivers to be hands-off on the street). The carmaker’s ambition is to take away the driver, that’s, attain Level 4 autonomy two to 4 years from now, however real-life implementation will hinge on laws, stated Wu.
“But I’m not worried about that too much. I understand the Chinese government is actually the most flexible in terms of technology regulation.”
The lidar camp
Musk’s disdain for lidar stems from the excessive prices of the distant sensing methodology that makes use of lasers. In the early days, a lidar unit spinning on high of a robotaxi may price as a lot as $100,000, stated Wu.
“Right now, [the cost] is at least two orders low,” stated Wu. After 13 years with Qualcomm in the U.S., Wu joined Xpeng in late 2018 to work on automating the firm’s electrical automobiles. He presently leads a core autonomous driving R&D crew of 500 workers and stated the pressure will double in headcount by the finish of this 12 months.
“Our next vehicle is targeting the economy class. I would say it’s mid-range in terms of price,” he stated, referring to the agency’s new lidar-powered sedan.
The lidar sensors powering Xpeng come from Livox, a agency touting more affordable lidar and an affiliate of DJI, the Shenzhen-based drone big. Xpeng’s headquarters is in the adjoining metropolis of Guangzhou about 1.5 hours’ drive away.
Xpeng isn’t the just one embracing lidar. Nio, a Chinese rival to Xpeng concentrating on a extra premium market, unveiled a lidar-powered car in January however the mannequin received’t begin manufacturing till 2022. Arcfox, a brand new EV model of Chinese state-owned carmaker BAIC, just lately stated it will be launching an electrical automotive outfitted with Huawei’s lidar.
Musk just lately hinted that Tesla could remove radar from production outright because it inches nearer to pure imaginative and prescient based mostly on digicam and machine studying. The billionaire founder isn’t significantly a fan of Xpeng, which he alleged owned a replica of Tesla’s outdated supply code.
In 2019, Tesla filed a lawsuit in opposition to Cao Guangzhi alleging that the former Tesla engineer stole commerce secrets and techniques and introduced them to Xpeng. XPeng has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Cao now not works at Xpeng.
Supply challenges
While Livox claims to be an unbiased entity “incubated” by DJI, a source told TechCrunch previously that it’s only a “team within DJI” positioned as a separate firm. The intention to distance from DJI comes as nobody’s shock as the drone maker is on the U.S. authorities’s Entity List, which has lower key suppliers off from a mess of Chinese tech corporations together with Huawei.
Other crucial elements that Xpeng makes use of embrace NVIDIA’s Xavier system-on-the-chip computing platform and Bosch’s iBooster brake system. Globally, the ongoing semiconductor shortage is pushing auto executives to ponder over future eventualities the place self-driving automobiles develop into much more depending on chips.
Xpeng is effectively conscious of provide chain dangers. “Basically, safety is very important,” stated Wu. “It’s more than the tension between countries around the world right now. Covid-19 is also creating a lot of issues for some of the suppliers, so having redundancy in the suppliers is some strategy we are looking very closely at.”
Taking on robotaxis
Xpeng may have simply tapped the flurry of autonomous driving answer suppliers in China, together with Pony.ai and WeExperience in its yard Guangzhou. Instead, Xpeng turns into their competitor, engaged on automation in-house and pledges to outrival the synthetic intelligence startups.
“The availability of massive computing for cars at affordable costs and the fast dropping price of lidar is making the two camps really the same,” Wu stated of the dynamics between EV makers and robotaxi startups.
“[The robotaxi companies] have to work very hard to find a path to a mass-production vehicle. If they don’t do that, two years from now, they will find the technology is already available in mass production and their value become will become much less than today’s,” he added.
“We know how to mass-produce a technology up to the safety requirement and the quarantine required of the auto industry. This is a super high bar for anybody wanting to survive.”
Xpeng has no plans of going visual-only. Options of automotive applied sciences like lidar have gotten cheaper and extra considerable, so “why do we have to bind our hands right now and say camera only?” Wu requested.
“We have a lot of respect for Elon and his company. We wish them all the best. But we will, as Xiaopeng [founder of Xpeng] said in one of his famous speeches, compete in China and hopefully in the rest of the world as well with different technologies.”
5G, coupled with cloud computing and cabin intelligence, will speed up Xpeng’s path to obtain full automation, although Wu couldn’t share a lot element on how 5G is used. When unmanned driving is viable, Xpeng will discover “a lot of exciting features” that go right into a automotive when the driver’s palms are freed. Xpeng’s electrical SUV is already accessible in Norway, and the firm is trying to additional broaden globally.
source https://infomagzine.com/chinas-xpeng-in-the-race-to-automate-evs-with-lidar-techcrunch/
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