Apsara Horizon is the dialogue segment of Alibaba Group’s Apsara Conference. It features figures who are engaging with Asia’s cutting-edge technologies. In these dialogues, esteemed guests share their stories and perspectives on the challenges, opportunities, and future of their respective fields. The topic of the first Apsara Horizon conversation on October 20 was “Leading the future with autonomous mobility,” featuring guest speakers Guo Zhenyu, the senior technical expert of the Autonomous Driving Lab at the Alibaba DAMO Academy, and Melvin Foo, founder and CEO of Whizz Mobility.
The autonomous mobility industry has been at the center of plenty of hype. Both speakers acknowledge that seeing AVs and EVs on the open road has become the industry’s collective goal. Foo described the value of refining autonomous technology as a crucial technological development. “Other than lower cost, the more important thing is to automate repetitive tasks and for robots to do more dangerous tasks,” he said.
Developing new technology naturally means encountering new challenges. Noting the inherent complexities that go into the “development, deployment, and operation” of autonomous robots, Guo gave the example of perception planning, which demands high computation power but becomes a small embedded unit in vehicles, rather than the powerful system that it could be in the cloud. “How are we going to make a model that returns the accuracy… but also renders smaller?” Guo asked.
Check out the full conversation in “Leading the future with autonomous mobility” below: