Writing by: CH_Chen Han
Get ready for “parking freedom”.
Before starting today’s article, let me ask you a question:
Did you manage to get your hands on KFC’s popular “Kedaya” last month?
In order to get the “Kedaya”, my colleagues almost went to all the KFCs around the company, and finally got what they wanted.
He was lucky, but many people on the internet shouted for “Kedaya freedom” and added new restrictions. From pursuing financial freedom in the beginning, sinking step by step to pursuing cherry freedom, strawberry freedom, ice-lolly freedom, and finally Kedaya freedom, people are eager to pursue various material and lifestyle freedoms to escape from the fast-paced life. In the automotive industry, autonomous driving engineers are pursuing a different kind of freedom, a true sense of freedom – time freedom.
Whether it is autonomous driving on public roads or automatic parking in parking lots, the ultimate goal is to free people from repetitive and meaningless driving and increase users’ discretionary time. As for whether you want to use these extra time to read, watch TV series, surf the internet, or grab a “Kedaya”, it is completely up to you.
However, it is not easy to achieve fully autonomous driving on complex roads, and in comparison, “parking freedom” is already within reach in parking lots.
Save 10,000 minutes a year?
Imagine this scenario:
On the weekend, you take your family with big and small bags ready to go out. Before leaving, you open your mobile phone interface and click one button to summon the car, and it drives automatically from the parking space to the elevator entrance. You carry your luggage, your wife holds the child, and the elderly at home help each other. Once you get out of the elevator, you can immediately get in the car.
Isn’t this a beautiful world?
Now imagine another scenario:
On the way to work, there is suddenly heavy rain, and your company only has ground parking spaces, but you did not bring an umbrella. When you arrive at the company, you simply park your car at the entrance of the office building. With a gentle tap on your phone, the car drives itself to a parking space, and you leave gracefully without getting wet.
Do you want such a feature?
All of the above are no longer just scenes in science fiction movies. Baidu’s AVP (Apollo Valet Parking) autonomous parking has gradually turned them into reality.Baidu AVP is currently the only domestically-produced memory parking product, which is the result of Baidu Apollo’s advanced autonomous driving technology being made available for personal use. Its goal is to solve the parking problems of frequent routes for users and bring a brand-new parking experience of “Coming when called, leaving when waved goodbye.”
In familiar parking environments, users can customize their entry and exit points as well as parking routes. By simply having the vehicle complete a simple route learning, automatic summoning and docking or automatic parking can be achieved. Currently, the maximum distance of unmanned parking opened by Baidu AVP is 150 meters, which is the longest distance of unmanned parking in the industry.
Moreover, Baidu AVP also supports a series of advanced functions to meet the parking needs of users in different scenarios. Let us consider some examples:
On weekends, you go to a mall you often visit. Once you get off the car at the familiar elevator entrance, your car will find a parking space by itself. It has already learned the route and is familiar with the hundreds of parking spaces along the way, so you know it can always find a space that belongs to it.
On another weekend, you drive to a large mall you have never been to before. Just as you are worrying about which elevator entrance is closest to the supermarket, the car system pops up a reminder that many drivers have already been here and indicated the parking spaces near each elevator entrance. You click on the one marked “Direct to Supermarket,” and the car will automatically drive to the recommended parking space.
If the parking spaces in your neighborhood are relatively narrow, now you can wait in front of the parking space, letting the car park itself or drive out by itself, without having to push the car door by hand or squeeze in and out of the narrow gap of the car door.
PAVP autonomous parking demonstration:
If one day you have to go through narrow paths like Guangzhou city villages or annoying stone pillars, just open Baidu AVP’s one-click exploration function and let the car take care of the rest. With its powerful visual and radar perception capabilities, it is more accurate than drivers and more confident in navigating narrow paths. And if you find yourself on the wrong path, it also comes with a “regret medicine”, so you don’t have to turn around. AVP’s track-back function ensures that the car can go back exactly the way it came in.
For a long time, automatic parking functions were regarded as “redundant” configurations on cars. However, after analyzing the actual usage scenarios, we can see that “we do not actually need to have automatic parking, we just need it to be more useful.”
Through technological advancement and advanced features, Baidu AVP has addressed many of the pain points and concerns in our daily car use, making automatic parking features a frequent and useful configuration for users, and even a “magic tool” that significantly improves the driving experience.
According to the analysis in the article “Analysis of the Development Status and Trend of Automatic Valet Parking Technology” in “Intelligent Car Design”:
“Assuming that each driver travels twice a day, needs to take and park the car twice a day, and each time takes an average of 7-8 minutes, then the time each driver wastes on taking and parking the car each day reaches 30 minutes, equivalent to 11,000 minutes per year or about 15 days. Through the application of AVP, each driver can save about 15 days of free time per year.”
15 days, even more than many people’s annual vacations, who would reject such “parking freedom”?
Why is it Baidu AVP?
So, the question is, why is Baidu AVP the first to implement these features that make life better?
In fact, people who are familiar with the self-driving industry should know that Baidu has been at the forefront of the self-driving race for a long time. Baidu started laying out self-driving technology as early as 2013, and in 2017, it launched the world’s first open self-driving platform Apollo. Currently, Baidu Apollo has industry-leading solutions in the three major fields of self-driving, smart cars, and intelligent transportation.
In the field of parking, as the leading developer of national autonomous valet parking technology standards, Baidu Apollo has conducted on-site research in more than 1,000 parking lots, collected 67 million frames of parking lot data, formed over 400 AVP production documents, and completed generalization tests in the TOP10 cities in China.
The massive data advantage and continuous accumulation are Baidu AVP’s confidence in leading the industry.
Baidu AVP consists of three core functions: memory valet parking, APA automatic valet parking, and RPA remote valet parking, which can be called the “full package” in the field of parking. Compared with common parking functions on the market, it’s mainly characterized by:
- The only one that can achieve “unmanned” (when the driver leaves the car) autonomous parking;
- Full scenario coverage, usable in above-ground and underground parking lots such as residential areas, shopping malls, and companies;
- Supports a wide variety of parking spot types, including perpendicular, parallel, and diagonal parking spaces with or without marks, as well as hundreds of derivative parking spot types, which cover almost all parking spot types available on the market;
- It has continuous evolution ability and can constantly add new complex scenarios and support for parking spots through over-the-air updates, such as adding cross-floor parking scenarios or mechanical parking spots;
- Easy to use, controlled by one key on the phone, allowing the car to come and go easily and monitoring the entire parking process on the phone;
- You learn from me, by sharing parking routes with other users, the car could easily apply the ready-made routes without having to learn and memorize them by itself;
- Customizable parking spot, could manually drag the parking spot on the car’s screen, and the car could autonomously park into the selected spot;
- Parking and exiting at any angle, supporting remote control of the vehicle to move directly/backward/left/right, whether left or right depends on the driver’s preference, to summon and exit from any of the six angles.
Moreover, in terms of safety measures, Baidu AVP has obtained safety standard certification such as TUV, which satisfies the safety requirements of international standards. When dealing with complex scenarios, AVP can identify surrounding objects such as pedestrians and vehicles and avoid them autonomously or stop actively.
In the future, Baidu AVP will continue to evolve and iterate more long-tail scenarios such as circling obstacles, automatically passing through door barriers, and shuffling park entry to meet more diverse parking demands of users and make parking more convenient.
Will it be the next standard configuration for cars?
After saying so much, you may wonder, on which car models can I experience Baidu AVP?Currently, the WmAuto W6 and GAC Aion Safe Series models are equipped with this feature on the market, and by the end of this year, new models such as the Great Wall Beast, Tank 500 (APA/RPA), and Euramobil Cat Series will be added, indicating that Baidu AVP has penetrated into the 150,000-200,000 yuan segment and is beginning to trend towards standard AVP. More and more vehicles with AVP functionality will gradually be delivered to end-users.
Statistics show that the terminal activation rate of Baidu AVP in equipped models is as high as 85%, and the retention rate in the second month is 80%. It has illuminated 180 cities, indicating user recognition of the AVP function.
As technology advances, parking is becoming increasingly easy. From the beginning, there was no parking assistance, and parking could only be judged by the naked eye. We gradually added ultrasonic reversing radar, which can be judged by the sound of the radar alarm; added reversing image/360° panoramic image, which can determine the position by image; added APA automatic parking, which can free up hands and feet, and people do not need to operate the car. Now, we have added AVP autonomous parking to vehicles, finally liberating people from the repetitive and boring parking, improving the parking experience and achieving parking freedom.
Just like the reversing radar and reversing image have almost become standard configuration for car purchases, functional features that can help users save time and effort will naturally be welcomed by more and more people. In the next stage, when you buy a smart car, the high-level intelligent parking function such as AVP will undoubtedly become a standard configuration.
So, the question arises, if you have spent 10,000 minutes on this feature for more than a year, what do you plan to do with this time?
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.