On May 18th, QCRAFT DAY, the first brand day of the L4 autonomous driving general solution company, Light Boat Intelligence Navigation, was held, and three products under the “Dual Engine” strategy were officially released: Longboat SPACE, a mobile travel space solution, DBQ V4, a fourth-generation production-grade autonomous driving solution, and Light Boat Matrix, an autonomous driving research and development toolchain.
These three products are designed for different scenarios and purposes.
Longboat SPACE is an unmanned driving minibus, positioned as a mobile travel space solution that can operate on complex public roads. It covers a range of long-distance to short-distance connecting scenarios, and the space can also be transformed in multiple ways. Light Boat Intelligence Navigation and Dongfeng Yuet Xiang released the Sharing Bus based on Longboat SPACE last year, which has already landed in several cities such as Wuhan and Dali for operation.
In addition, Light Boat Intelligence Navigation also introduced the fourth-generation production-grade autonomous driving solution DBQ V4 at this release event. Yu Qian, the founder and CEO of Light Boat Intelligence Navigation, stated that this system can achieve 99% of L4 capabilities with only 10% of the cost, and the production cost is as low as RMB 10,000. Moreover, this system can be modified according to customer needs. Even if the hardware is “trimmed”, the software is still shared, but the richer hardware can provide a wider range of assisted driving functions.
Currently, Light Boat Intelligence Navigation’s DBQ V4 has three hardware configurations to choose from: standard edition, enhanced edition, and flagship edition. Although the exact sensor configuration of the three products has not been officially announced, from the pictures, it can be seen that the standard edition is equipped with one LiDAR, the enhanced edition with two, and the flagship edition with three.
Combining the cost of RMB 10,000 and the cooperation with Horizon Robotics, we speculate that the mass-produced standard edition solution is highly likely to adopt the hardware configuration of the Journey 2/3 chip + one LiDAR + several cameras + millimeter-wave radar to provide customers with assisted driving solutions in high-speed scenarios.Another major product is the “Qingzhou Matrix”. This is the underlying system of Qingzhou’s “Autonomous Driving Super Factory” system, which is a set of automatic driving research and development toolchains centered around simulation. It connects the entire process from data processing, labeling, training, large-scale simulation and technical output. Today, this system is officially open to the public and will help customers to develop efficiently.
In addition to the product release, Qingzhou Zhixing officially announced its cooperation with Volcano Engine, T3 Travel, and Horizon Line. The cooperation with Volcano Engine is at the underlying system level, T3 Travel can jointly launch the public operation of Robotxai with Qingzhou Zhixing, accelerating the commercial landing of Robotxai, and the cooperation with Horizon Line is to jointly create a mass-produced solution for automatic driving and promote the research and development of high-level automatic driving programs.
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.