China's Baidu unveils its first L5 autonomous robocar

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Chinese search engine Baidu has revealed its first Level 5 autonomous "robocar" at its annual flagship technology conference, Baidu World 2021.

The car, which was unveiled by Robin Li, co-founder and CEO of Baidu, represents something of an aesthetic departure from traditional auto design. It has no steering wheel or pedals, automatic gull-wing doors, a glass roof, external sensors and "zero-gravity seats". 

It also comes complete with voice and facial recognition, and advanced AI that can analyse the internal and external surroundings, making predictive suggestions to the occupants to make the journey more comfortable.

The robocar will ultimately be controlled by a human via the cloud, and the robocars are being marketed less as a robot and more in terms of a "friend", that can learn a user's preferences and communicate smoothly with the user.

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"The future cars will be the robocars, which possess L5 level autonomous driving ability, speech and face recognition capacity analysing the potential needs of users and actively providing services," Li said at the unveiling at Baidu World 2021.

"They will drive autonomously, act as both an intelligent assistant and loyal companion, and be self-learning," he added.

Autonomous driving is categorised across five levels. The higher the level, the smarter the technology, with L5 representing fully autonomous driving. 

In addition to unveiling the robocar, the Chinese tech giant also launched a new autonomous robotaxi platform called Luobo Kuaipao, which is seen as a push to accelerate the commercialisation of self-driving technology.

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Baidu says that in the first half of 2021, its Apollo self-driving service completed more than 400,000 rides and drove over 14 million km (8.7 million miles) in the two years since it has been set up. The service has been available in four cities across China - Beijing, Guangzhou, Changsha and Cangzhou - and the company says the technology provides a solid foundation to transition its robotaxi to a commercial operation.

Beijing-based Baidu has invested heavily in self-driving technology in recent years and is planning to expand its autonomous taxi services to 30 cities across China over the next two to three years.

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