Baidu has announced that its car-making arm Jidu Automotive’s first production autonomous vehicle will be powered by the Nvidia Drive Orin SoC (system-on-chip). The next-generation vehicle with Level 4 autonomous driving capability is set to be unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show in April, followed by mass production and delivery by 2023.
“The JiDU vehicle has been designed to operate under the concepts of free movement, natural communication, and self-improvement,” said Robin Li, Baidu co-founder and CEO, at Baidu’s annual flagship developer’s conference Baidu Create 2021.
“First, the JiDU self-driving vehicle features L4 autonomous driving capability for free movement. Second, human-car interaction and accurate identification of speech semantics enable the car to communicate naturally. Third, the vehicle can self-learn and iterate based on user’s habits and constantly optimize autonomous driving features and smart cockpit experiences to realize self-growth.”
The intelligent driving system is powered by Baidu’s autonomous driving computing platform using Orin, while its software and algorithms are being jointly developed by Jidu and Baidu. Orin is specifically designed for software-defined cars, enabling continuous upgrades throughout the car’s entire life via over-the-air software updates. It has 254 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of computing performance and can support autonomous driving functions, confidence view visualization, digital clusters, infotainment and passenger interaction AI.