Baidu joins the growing list of companies which have given the greenlight to test Level 4 autonomous vehicles on selected public roads; in the case for Baidu it’s in Beijing. Reports indicate that the tests are limited to a closed pilot zone in the capital’s southern district of Yizhuang.

The Baidu solution for Level 4 autonomous driving (L4) is called Apollo Lite and is vision-based specifically designed for urban use. The license is given provided that the platform vehicle can smoothly navigate through tunnels and schools together with daily driving complications including pedestrian traffic. The system should also be able to recognise traffic signals and markings. Additionally, the car also has to have the capability to overtake other cars and park on ramps autonomously.

According to Baidu, Apollo Lite is the sole Level 4 autonomous urban-specific sensing solution in China which is vision-based. It is able to process huge amounts of data coming off 10 cameras with a speed of 200 frames per second. The combined use of these cameras give the Apollo Lite a 360 degree ‘vision’ of the environment in real-time. The system has a head-on detection range of 240 metres.

Apollo Lite is based on Apollo 3.5 which is Baidu’s latest version off the Apollo open source autonomous driving platform. The vision-based Apollo Lite is claimed to be relatively low-cost solution to achieve L4 driving capability compared to systems which may include Lidar sensors.