Baidu Self-Driving Car To Rival Google's Driverless Car?

Headquartered in Beijing, China, Baidu Inc. is one of the world's leading web service companies that runs China's biggest internet search engine. The engineers at Baidu have taken it to their heart to develop an autonomous aka self driving car of their own. The Chinese have a way of disrupting the present technology in a way that astonishes the world. In the race to build the best driverless car, Baidu will now join the likes of Google, Apple as well as many leading automobile manufacturers across the world. Baidu's CEO, Mr. Robin Li revealed that the company has collaborated with automakers to develop a smart car by utilizing its resources in IoT, Big Data and Cloud Computing.

Among various technologies to be employed for the Baidu self driving car, the internet giant will make use of Baidu Maps (the Chinese variant of Google Maps) and Baidu Brain, a project undertaken by the company to build the world’s largest and most powerful computer cluster. Interestingly, Baidu Brain was initially aimed at improving image recognition as online search queries shift from being text-based to images.


If you believed that Google or Apple are the only ones to truly compete in the self driving car development race, well, think again. There's Indian manufacturer Mahindra & Mahindra is reportedly Mahindra's Self-Driving Car Reportedly Under Works - Engineers Invited For The Challenge. Then there's universities such as GoGet Self-Driving Cars Closer To Reality - A UNSW Australia Research Project and Driverless Car "SCOT" Uses Remote Sensing - Developed By Singapore-MIT Alliance who are working on their own pet projects for the same. Another Chinese company Leshi Internet Information & Technology, which makes web-enabled TVs is also said to have invested billions of dollars into developing a connected electric car.

Apple's electric auto has been repeatedly under the radar of news mongers. In a recent reveal, it came to light that Apple may begin production of their autonomous cars as early as 2020. Google is up-ing it game with a plan of bringing a self-driving car on the road within five years. In fact, Google announced that their prototype self-driving cars would be seen riding on the public roads this summer near its HQ in Mountain View, California.

It will be interesting to see if and how self driving cars become mainstream. Baidu is a powerful new addition to the arena. What are your thoughts about self driving cars and riding to office in a car that drives itself? Share with us in comments below.

Source: Baidu to launch driverless car later this year - BBC News

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