ZF and Baidu’s cooperation to advance autonomous driving technology for the Chinese market has come to fruition with the first application developed using the ProAI supercomputer.
The system supports a feature which can drive a vehicle to a parking space and back without driver input. This can be performed using a smartphone app, which relies in part on an intelligent control box from ZF.
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It can process data from the vehicle’s environmental sensors and from car-to-x communication. It can then send the relevant signals to actuators such as steering and braking systems.
The valet parking function is currently in a test fleet from Pand Auto, one of the largest Chinese car-sharing providers.
“ZF ProAI is ready for production,” said ZF head of Advanced Engineering, Torsten Gollewski. “It is the result of our cooperation with NVIDIA, which we announced exactly one year ago at CES 2017.
“In our current project with Baidu, this supercomputer shows how we are accelerating autonomous driving and also makes it simpler for new players in the industry to demonstrate mobility innovations.”
ZF maintains the new valet parking system addresses the needs of vehicle manufacturers as well as mobility service providers. Primarily, its goal is to significantly reduce the operating costs for car-sharing providers, while at the same time improving processes and convenience for customers and vehicle users.
The Pand Auto electric test vehicles fitted with the automatic parking systems were displayed to the public for the first time at a driving event in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, in the run-up to CES 2018 in Las Vegas.
