Baidu Apollo has won a bid to build a 5G intelligent driving project in Chengdu, in southwest China’s Sichuan province, in a tender worth RMB 105 million (USD 16.1 million), the internet giant said in a press release on Thursday.
Baidu Apollo will reshuffle 30 kilometers of traditional roads in the Singapore-Sichuan Hi-Tech Innovation Park in the city to facilitate data sharing between the road, passengers, and cars, by leveraging on its technologies including “Vehicle-to-Everything.” Once installed, it will offer an extra layer of safety for autonomous driving and Baidu will roll out its robobuses and robotaxis to people located there.
The new project will add to Baidu Apollo’s growing portfolio of smart transportation solutions across China.
The company clinched its largest deal to date in August, when a subsidiary won a RMB 460 million (USD 71 million) tender to build autonomous-driving suitable digital road infrastructure in the Huangpu district of Guangzhou for the state-owned SCI Group, according to information Baidu provided to KrASIA. The so-called multi-modal mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) platform was deployed last month on a trial basis and includes robotaxis, robobuses, unmanned cleaning and disinfection vehicles, as well as self-driving vending machines.
Baidu won bids for similar projects in Chongqing, Changsha, Hefei, Baoding, Zhuzhou, and Yinchuan, which plan to create trial areas for autonomous driving and road-vehicle coordination.