Chinese tech company Baidu is aiming to make self-driving cars commericially viable by 2018. To that end, Baidu will be testing its own autonomous cars in the U.S. very soon.
In an interview with Baidu’s Chief Scientist Andrew Ng, Ng says that being able to test its cars in the U.S. would be a significant step for the company. To that end, Baidu has been advocating for better coordination with the U.S. government, which he sais is necessary to get self-driving cars on the road.
While self-driving cars are capable of handling a wide variety of situations, the fact of the matter is that self-driving cars are still not ready for the open road as the accident that happened with Google’s own self-driving car can attest. To counter that solution, Ng recommends that the government could make small changes in infrastructure to accommodate robot cars. “The (artificial intelligenece) is good enough where the changes to infrastructure are modest. Maybe in the distant future, we could make it drive like a human driver, but not in two years,” says Ng.
As for Baidu’s self driving vehicle aspirations, the company hopes to roll out self-driving shuttles that runs in a loop in a limited area in China by the end of 2018.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
