Improve the intelligent level of bus production

At Baidu Create 2018, more than 7000 developers witnessed the launch of the 100th "Apollon". Apollon is an autonomous bus jointly built by Baidu and Jinlong Bus, and also the world's first L4 class autonomous bus to achieve mass production.

More selected cases

Click Download

Use products/solutions

Related cases

Project Background

In 2017, Golden Dragon Bus and Baidu worked together for the first time to promote the development, application and promotion of automatic driving technology in China, representing the beginning of a new automotive revolution. The first L4 class self driving bus in China jointly launched a new era of self driving service for mass transportation. In July 2018, the two sides jointly launched 100 Apollons.

Customer pain points

Two years before the cooperation, Jinlong Automobile once fell into a period of low performance decline. Compared with the peak value in 2015, the loss in 2016, the production and sales volume and operating income in 2017 decreased by about one-third year on year. In 2016, Jinlong Auto's operating revenue was 21.888 billion yuan, down 18.66% year on year; However, the net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies was - 720 million yuan, down 234.26% year on year.

Before that, new energy vehicles were once an important driver of Jinlong's performance growth.

In 2015, Dragon Auto realized an operating revenue of 26.834 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 25.22%, and a net profit of 536 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 115.33%, ranking the forefront of the industry. Among them, the company sold 18400 new energy buses, a year-on-year increase of 437.28%, accounting for 21.2% of the company's total vehicle sales. The sales volume of pure electric buses was 12300, up 1041% year on year. The total sales of new energy vehicles was 11.86 billion yuan.

Solution

Behind the mass production of Apollon is Baidu's rich technical capability system, including the Apollo open automatic driving platform. At the same time, it is also strongly supported by Baidu's intelligent cloud industry Internet of Things platform. Tiangong is a "one-stop, fully hosted" intelligent Internet of Things platform integrating Baidu Cloud ABC (AI, Big Data, Cloud Computing). From the end to the cloud, from data collection, transmission, calculation, storage, presentation to analysis, Tiangong can provide comprehensive basic products and services. As the neural network of the whole system, Tiangong has provided stable and reliable data channels and efficient data storage services for "Apollon".

  • Physical access
    The driving process of Apollon is inseparable from the real-time data acquisition and reporting of the radar and various sensors at the driving end, which requires a stable and reliable access system supporting high concurrency. IoT Hub provides Apollon with a data channel that can support hundreds of millions of concurrent connections and messages, secure and reliable reporting and sending two-way connections between massive devices and the cloud.

  • Rule engine
    Apollon uses the Rule Engine to flexibly forward and process device messages, and sets rules in the form of SQL to filter, modify, and forward the data reported by sensors, and seamlessly forward the data to different data destinations according to different scenarios.

  • Time sequence database 「 TSDB 」
    In the automatic driving scenario, the status and monitoring data of various vehicles will be transmitted to the cloud at a frequency of 10Hz or higher. These data are typical time series data. The time series database ensures the efficient and stable writing of these high-frequency time series data, and realizes stable and reliable storage. In the data export layer, the time series database also provides a strong statistical and computing capability for the upper Apollon's operation application management platform, supporting the operation management platform's efficient operation and management of automatic driving data. At the same time, in terms of big data analysis and mining, time series database also provides docking with Hadoop/Spark platform for big data analysis.

  • visualization
    The IoT Visualization products provided by Tiangong provide developers with a visual application development experience of what they see is what they get. Using an interactive visual designer, developers can easily create dashboards, automatically adapt to various screen sizes, and monitor the running status of Apollon vehicles in real time.

Customer income

In July 2018, the two sides jointly launched 100 Apollons. In August 2021, the newly upgraded Apollon II was officially unveiled in Huangpu, Guangzhou.

As of today, Apollon, an autonomous bus, has been put into commercial operation in 31 regions and 38 scenes across the country. Robobus, an autonomous bus, covers 11 cities across the country.

Future Outlook

Liu Changkang, general manager of Baidu's automatic driving department, said that Jinlong Bus is the leading enterprise of Chinese buses and enjoys high brand awareness and reputation at home and abroad. Baidu will further strengthen high-quality cooperation with Jinlong Bus in the future, summarize the successful experience of past cooperation, optimize every link of research and development, production, delivery and after-sales, and control costs, The high-quality products carefully created by both parties will surely blossom everywhere at home and abroad, and the complex world will be simpler with technology.