Chinese tech giant has forged a new partnership with Geely and Toyota to cooperate on areas involving artificial intelligence and self-driving vehicles.
Reuters reports that the partnership will see Geely and Toyota join Baidu’s autonomous driving platform.
Current plans from Baidu call for it to provide its Apollo Minibus software product for autonomous buses to Toyota’s e-Palette vehicles in the future. Baidu will work with Toyota to explore other uses of self-driving vehicle technologies, the vice president of Baidu’s intelligent driving unit, Li Zhenyu said.
Also Read: VW The Latest To Join Baidu’s Apollo Self-Driving Consortium
As for Geely, Baidu intends on cooperating with it on a number of different AI applications such as intelligent connectivity and smart mobility.
Baidu’s open Apollo platform was launched in 2017 and is now one of the largest autonomous driving ecosystems in the world. More than 130 industry partners have signed up to partner with Apollo, including car manufacturers such as Daimler, Volvo, Ford, and BMW. In addition, thousands of developers are contributing to the Apollo open-source platform.
Baidu established Apollo in an effort to speed up the development of autonomous driving technologies by collaborating with many other companies. Baidu, like many other Chinese companies, is looking to take a lead not just in the world of autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence, but also in the electrification of the industry. The company hasn’t really made its mark on the United States just yet, but it does have approval to test self-driving vehicles on select public streets across China.
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