Baidu autonomous taxis will now carry people even at night

Baidu, the Asian company known for its Chinese-language search engine, has begun to activate fully autonomous taxi service — without a driver — what Travel will be offered to citizens from 9 am to 11 am.thereby expanding my usual work schedule in the city, which until now was from 09:00 to 17:00, details TechCrunch.

Thus, the new schedule will allow the company drive your cars autonomously in low light conditionsWell, so far, we repeat, they have only made trips until 5:00 pm, when there is still natural light. To do this, according to the aforementioned media, robot taxis will use various sensors and cameras, as well as LiDAR scanners, which will allow them to recognize the environment and the road in darker conditions.

Baidu also produces use of the visual language system which, in turn, runs through the Wenxin Big artificial intelligence model developed by the company itself and which is also used in its text-to-image conversion service. This visual language system is particularly capable of identifying objects that are “invisible” or that may appear unexpectedly on the road. This happens even in low light conditions.

“The model will allow autonomous vehicles to quickly recognize an invisible object, such as recognizing special vehicles (fire engine, ambulance), mistakenly detect plastic bags, and others,” Baidu clarifies. The firm also claims that Wenxin’s artificial intelligence could “significantly improve the potential for generalizing the perception of self-driving driving.”

Baidu expects service expansion to attract 1 million passengers

Baidu hopes that increase the number of hours of driverless taxi service to reach one million customers in the Wuhan area.. Yes, it does not specify what this advance would mean at the benefit level. However, we know that autonomous car rides cost as much as regular taxi services. And that the company data showed that citizens do not hesitate to get into one of these cars.

In fact, Baidu boasts that Apollo Go, an app dedicated to autonomous taxis, completed during the third quarter of 2022 for a total of 474,000 trips. This represents a year-to-year growth of 311% as well as 65% quarterly. It remains to be seen how well taxis are received at night.