Fanglin Sun is the leader of BYD's autonomous driving technology project. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

With the take-off of China's industry at the end of the nineties of the last century, as a powerful engine to promote the rapid development of the global economy, the world's automobile industry has also entered a period of rapid development, maintaining high-digit growth for more than ten consecutive years... From the annual output of 30 to 40 million cars to nearly 90 million today, there is a perfect market division and a mature spare parts industry system under the huge consumer group.

This subdivision of the supporting industry pattern has not only brought about the global development and integration of the automobile industry, but also made the hard component technology inside the automobile have been developed to the extreme within the existing framework. The supply of various spare parts has become almost as ubiquitous as Chinese cabbage, and entering the automotive industry no longer requires a high threshold, but has sprung up in large quantities. Correspondingly, in the face of the increasing impact of the global market, if we want to survive the fierce elimination of various automobile manufacturers around the world, we have to find another way.

Just like the popular slogan in the current automotive industry: European and American cars pay attention to quality, and Japanese cars pay attention to service.

Behind these two, the essence is that there is not much room for consumers to choose, and on the same price grade of cars, various manufacturers are unable to open obvious technical gaps and differences.

In this context, in order to stand out from the cruel competition, well-known automobile manufacturers around the world have invariably set their sights on intelligent driving technology, which is different from the software technology upgrade of automobile hard parts transformation. Among them, not only foreign auto giants Honda, Ford, General Motors, Daimler, Toyota, Volkswagen, etc., but also domestic manufacturers such as BYD, Great Wall, BAIC, Geely and other domestic manufacturers have invested huge sums of money to carry out smart car projects, in addition, there are Apple, Google, Microsoft, Huawei These "cross-border" high-tech enterprises are also involved in specific technology research and development.

Sun Fanglin was hired by BYD as the chief scientist of the Central Automotive Research Institute, one of the three major R&D centers, as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Science and Technology and a researcher of strategic information technology, responsible for the research and development of unmanned driving systems.

He saw the events of the Asia-Pacific Youth Robotics Competition on the evening news.

At that time, after dinner, his grandson was sitting alone on the sofa in the living room, looking for cartoons to watch, and inadvertently caught a glimpse of the Pioneer vs. Samoyed, and he couldn't take his eyes off it.

"Grandpa, grandpa, I want this robot ......"

Children naturally beg their close elders to buy things they like but don't have, and his grandson is no exception. Faced with the baby grandson who suddenly came over, Sun Fanglin, who was staying in the study to read the technical documents, couldn't help but run over to look at it with curiosity, and then, like his grandson, all his attention was attracted by the robot in the TV screen that was quickly evading Samoyed's pursuit.

"How is this possible, there is already such a mature performance of artificial intelligence, and it is still in a teenager's robot competition....."

Sun Fanglin was so stunned that he couldn't even hear his grandson shouting a few times in a row.

As the leader of BYD's autonomous driving technology project, he knows very well how difficult it is to develop intelligent driving systems that can be applied to cars. There are more than 10,000 people in the Academia Sinica, and he selected more than 200 of the most outstanding relevant technical researchers to form a special intelligent R&D team. However, five years have passed, and nearly three billion funds have been burned, but there is still no mature product that can be used. At most, the technological achievements developed by it can only be applied to assisted driving, and are placed in newly developed new energy vehicles and high-end vehicles as a gimmick to attract consumers.

However, at this time, he saw on TV what he and the entire R&D team could not do with a lot of time and money, a truly mature intelligent driving system.

The so-called unmanned driving technology, in fact, needs more than just the intelligent program loaded in the vehicle to be able to carry out automatic driving in accordance with the designed road traffic rules, in this regard, just to give the driver a time-saving and labor-saving excuse to rest, in fact, a driver can still achieve the goal, nothing more than to appear that they have money, the car is forced to be higher. Its real key use is to deal with those sudden emergencies that are not within the road rules, which is the most important thing in intelligent driving technology.

To take the simplest example, on the highway, a large truck directly in front of you suddenly bursts a tire, and the car rolls over and rolls over, and it doesn't take long to crash into the car you are driving. At this time, in the face of this fatal crisis, what should you do as a driver?

Normal people will say to slow down quickly, brake to avoid, this answer is not wrong, however, people always have a lack of concentration, at this time, it is inevitable that there will be some sluggishness in the reaction.... It is possible to mistake the accelerator for the brake, or to lose sight of the vehicle behind it, and at the same time slow down and turn yourself into the unlucky stuffing inside that layer of sandwich cake. Most likely, of course, the time left for the driver to react in this fatal crisis is too short, and even if he can concentrate, he simply can't find the right way to avoid it in a hurry.

At this time, the importance of intelligent driving systems is highlighted. Machinery is less prone to fatigue than humans, and the reaction is more acute and fast than humans, when human beings are still thinking about whether they step on the brakes first, or hit the steering wheel first, the program chip with the built-in intelligent driving system has been processed through hundreds of millions of calculations, and at this moment, the most correct vehicle avoidance plan has been made, and the driver has been helped to avoid this fatal crisis.

This is also the reason why Sun Fanglin immediately picked up his mobile phone as quickly as possible after a moment of stunned and dialed the senior management of BYDD in charge of technology development and application, and he deeply knew what the performance in the picture meant.

Compared with the news host on the show, he was still surprised that the robot's intelligent program reaction speed can be faster than that of a dog, and every time he can easily avoid the Samoyed pursuit, he is not surprised at all, because as long as the unmanned technology goes through this road, it is not surprising that with the terrifying computing power of the chip itself, it can be faster than a dog. What he really cared about was that during the whole three-minute chase, in the face of nearly forty attacks by the Samoyed, this robot called the Harbinger did not make a single mistake, which was the main reason for his shock.

This not only represents that its built-in intelligent program has been a very mature and perfect application technology, but also ensures its subsequent reliability, once any car manufacturer takes this intelligent program as the core and transforms it into the corresponding intelligent driving system, it is equivalent to immediately put into large-scale use.

If this reason is not enough. Then, according to statistics from the Ministry of Communications last year, there were 270,000 traffic accidents across the country, with 60,000 car accident deaths and more than 330,000 injuries.

In the face of this intelligent technology that may occupy a huge first-mover advantage in the next reshuffle of the automotive industry, if you still grind and chirp to play official articles, it is really stupid!

In fact, just like Sun Fanglin's actions at the first time, all such practitioners who have seen relevant news reports, as long as they can speak, have already contacted the senior management of their departments and enterprises through their own channels, and plan to go to the magic capital to find out.

For a while, as the results of this competition were known to more and more people, the sky above the small XH area was changing color.

Unlike in the past, in addition to those ordinary eyes, this Asia-Pacific Youth Robot Competition began to gather far more intense attention than the general sense......

(To be continued.) )