China's open policy in encouraging tech innovation won praises at a recent session focusing on the autonomous vehicle industry at the SXSW festival, which is known to be one of the world's tech innovation centers.
Beijing-based MOGO.AI is one of the companies benefiting from China's innovation-friendly policies. The company has been conducting a groundbreaking project integrating smart city development and autonomous driving technology.
At the featured SXSW panel session themed Self-Driving Cars - from Science Fiction to Scale on March 14th, Kyle Vogt, co-founder and CEO of autonomous vehicle firm Cruise, said he really admired the Chinese government for "keeping the regulation wide open", formulating various policies to facilitate the construction of road information technology infrastructure, and creating space for the development of intelligent connected vehicles and autonomous driving vehicles. A recent video demonstrates his viewpoint. In the video, a MOGO Robotaxi, with all its sensors covered up, realizes L4 autonomous driving under the guidance of not only city traffic lights, but an entire smart city system in Hengyang, Hunan Province. MOGO AI Station 2.0, the "smart traffic brain" at the centre of this technology breakthrough, is capable of accessing real-time information from traffic lights and other traffic participants, thus providing early warnings for unexpected pedestrians, road conditions and front-car braking. Armed with these environmental information, the video shows that MOGO Robotaxi makes decisions including speeding up, lane changing and overtaking. During the entire process, MOGO AI Station 2.0 processed 102.9GB of data, analyzed 3.29 million frames of perception data and identified 1,170 traffic participants (pedestrians and other vehicles) - all completely safely. MOGO AI Station 2.0 enables higher driving quality equivalent to that of a human driver or an autonomous vehicle with usable sensors. Moreover,with wider field of view and longer sense of distance, it provides early warning services to vehicles several kilometers away or beyond visual range of a vehicle. Traffic jams and accidents will also be avoidable since most traffic accidents are caused by drivers' limited perceptual capacity. MOGO.ai's "Vehicle-Road-Cloud Integrated" system is capable of managing urban transportation as a whole, preventing congestion providing green channels to public vehicles and even changing traffic light status to buy time for ambulances and fire trucks. The video, which is widespread on social media, revealed the world's first city-level autonomous driving business project by MOGO.ai. The first phase of the project has been completed with a 38km-long continuous V2X road construction. Until now, autonomous driving projects worldwide have been confined to urban fringes. Deployed in a city of up to 6 million population, the project not only represents the maturity of Mogo.ai's technology, but reflects the determination of Chinese central and local government authorities in investing in autonomous driving technology. With a China-based company attracting the attention and support of their government, US-based firms like Cruise and General Motors are well aware of the need to lift their game. Mogo.ai Information and Technology Co., Ltd. was founded in 2017, and has quickly risen to China's leading full-stack technology and operation services provider for autonomous driving. MOGO AUTO Autonomous Vehicle MOGO AUTO Autonomous VehicleAbout Mogo.ai:
