Previously, in our article posted on December 10, I shared my remarks on the prospects of technological development from the hardware aspect of the self-driving system. Now, I wish to explain from the perspectives of global value recognition, industry, market, and AI development to further answer why the next decade marks the explosive growth for self-driving technology…
-In accordance with the survey about consumers’ perception of self-driving technology among 22,000 individuals from 13 countries by US company ANSYS last year,
77% of respondents would feel comfortable riding in a fully autonomous car within their lifetime. The data showed great enhancements compared to similar surveys taken previously, meaning the acceptance will definitely increase year by year, while the rate of rejections will decline in the same period.
-The mainstream values and trends in living and consumption entailing environmental protection and energy saving, massive and more efficient connections concerning interpersonal communications (transportation, communication, network) as well as the development needs of the vehicle sharing industry will be held greatly responsible for the continuous growth of self-driving technology.
-After several years of cross-over engagement in the self-driving field, the time for the technology industry to examine the returns on their investments has come; meanwhile, the automotive industry through their frequent entrenchment of alliances and M&As of startups try to go ahead of the game compared to technology industry. Intense cross-industry competitions will pace up the mass production and commercialization.
-From themes of exhibitions and trends of the five iconic auto shows around the globe in recent years , a change in the essence has occurred, especially the subtlety which the auto shows have been put to comparison with some world-class consumer electronics expositions. Such phenomenon is the strong evidence that automotive industry is no longer about building traditional cars, as the self-driving technology will induce the technology companies into the field of automobile and allow these companies to turn the tables in the future automotive development.
-In the development of AI (artificial intelligence), one of the key technical indicators is image recognition. ImageNet from the US has held the annual ILSVRC image recognition competition since 2010, and, the organization for the events with the advanced objective of image understanding from 2018 and onward has been transferred to Google-backed WebVision after the ultimate event in 2017 due to the fact that error rate of image recognition by the champion team has begun to outperform humans since 2015. The Chinese teams Alibaba, SenseTime (found by the team under Chinese University of Hong Kong), and Huawei dominated the top three in the 2019 event. Judging from the year-on-year leap in competition results as well as the vast array of resources backing the lineup, the application of AI in self-driving technology will definitely be implemented in more delicate partitions, thereby allowing advancement of safety standards to greater level. In addition, a year ago, Uber released AVS, a self-driving standard visualization platform, on which the "image performance" of each self-driving system - including the received sensory information, image classification, and object motion inference - can be clearly depicted on this platform, and allowing system developers to utilize this standard visualization information to further reallocate resources to the development of other core technologies of self-driving systems in focus.