A few days ago, LiDAR Company Hesai Technology and SAIC's commercial vehicle intelligent driving company Youdao Zhitu announced that the two sides have officially reached a strategic cooperation. According to the agreement, Hesai Technology will provide Youdao Zhitu with high-performance lidar sensors for L4 and L3 autonomous driving, and carry out in-depth cooperation on the mass production of semi-solid-state lidar at the vehicle level. The two sides will cooperate and explore around the R&D iteration of autonomous driving technology and other business scenarios, and work together for the technological development of smart transportation, the early scale of smart logistics services, and the safe mass production of autonomous commercial vehicles.
Relying on the technical accumulation and successful experience of the "5G+L4" smart heavy truck project in Yangshan Port, Youdao Zhitu focuses on L3 and L4 level autonomous driving products in specific scenarios such as ports and factories, as well as trunk logistics scenarios, and creates a new business model of "technology + product + operation". As of early December, the quasi-commercial autonomous driving mileage of Youdao Zhitu L4 intelligent heavy truck has exceeded 2 million kilometers, and more than 61,000 TEUs of real transfer business has been completed.
At present, Youdao Zhitu has been equipped with Hesai high-performance lidar on its L4 smart heavy truck, through the long-distance and high-precision perception of lidar, combined with multi-sensor fusion perception, 5G-V2X vehicle communication, to achieve L4 level automatic driving of the port, with centimeter-level positioning, accurate parking, interaction with automated port machinery equipment and Donghai Bridge queue driving and other functions. At the same time, Hesai lidar can ensure reliable perception in the harsh working environment such as high humidity, high salt fog, rain fog, and heavy truck vibration along the coast of the port area, and ensure the stable operation of unmanned trucks in the port.
In the future, Youdao Zhitu also plans to install hesai semi-solid-state lidar and other products on more mass-produced commercial models such as new generation L3 smart heavy trucks, smart city buses and smart sweepers.