Didi opens self-driving car lab near Apple in California

Apple-backed Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi on Wednesday opened an artificial intelligence lab in Mountain View, Calif., where the firm will develop intelligent driving systems and AI-based transportation security.

Didi's U.S. self-driving car facility represents a major expansion effort for the company, which has so far limited most of its physical operations within China, reports Recode.

The new lab's location is also interesting. Mountain View sits between Palo Alto and Sunnyvale, and is just a stone's throw away from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino.

Though a direct connection between the self-driving lab and Apple has not been announced, Apple invested $1 billion in Didi last year. The investment, Didi's single largest at the time, marked a major shift for Apple, which traditionally opens its vast coffers only for low-profile acquisitions.

"We are making the investment for a number of strategic reasons, including a chance to learn more about certain segments of the China market," Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the time. "Of course, we believe it will deliver a strong return for our invested capital over time as well."

Staffing Didi's lab are a number of standouts in the robotics, AI and engineering fields. Charlie Miller, who is best known for remotely hacking a moving Jeep, was poached from Uber's self-driving team to lead Didi's security and safety development teams, the report said. Didi also poached staff from Google's Waymo self-driving car spinoff, including senior software engineer Jia Zhaoyin.

Apple is working on its own self-driving vehicle under the name Project Titan, but the effort has been met with serious roadblocks over the past year. Rumors initially pointed to the development of a full-fledged branded car, but the initiative has since been greatly scaled down due to unforeseen setbacks. Following a round of layoffs, Apple's Project Titan team reportedly has until the end of 2017 to prove it can move forward on its own, or will need the help of a third-party automaker.

Most recently, reports in October suggest Apple is turning its focus toward the software side of self-driving car technology, hiring away engineers from BlackBerry's QNX to develop augmented reality car navigation and other in-car technology.

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13 Comments

SpamSandwich 20 Years · 32917 comments

About 7 years ago

And here's a picture of Tim and Deedee. /jk

9secondkox2 9 Years · 3231 comments

Smart of Apple to use Didi as a databank.

cali 11 Years · 3494 comments

I can actually see what's happening here.

I said it when they first invested in Didi, Apple will create an enjoyable ride share experience. Uber feels so outdated in reality(the app is futuristic though).

Instead of some random person picking you up in his car imagine using ApplePay to call up your ride. A bad a** Apple Car pulls up and you ride in style and entertainment.

My friend called an Uber the other day and some random truck picked her up. It felt so old, even older than yellow cab cars. I can't wait to see what Apple does.

radarthekat 13 Years · 3905 comments

I still say Apple will leave self-driving tech to the car makers. Limits Apple's liability in the area I think they will actually pursue, described in a previous post of mine...

The car of the future is already here. It's called a Smartphone. Think about it. If you were to clear the slate, look at the modern world and ask yourself, how would I design a transportation system given existing and soon-to-come technologies, like autonomous driving, real-time availability scheduling. Route optimization, etc, no way you'd conclude there should be a car, or two, in every garage. You'd create a technology/software infrastructure to allow individuals to call up the transportation they need (car, truck, van, etc) on-demand. And it would show up wherever they are, or wherever they are going to be, when it's needed. You'd be able to schedule transportation in advance, like the airport shuttles of yesteryear that you'd schedule a week in advance. Uber pretty much killed that business, I expect.

Or schedule recurring transportation, such as to take the kids to soccer practice and back. In this case the transportation technology system might suggest a shared van service, that knows the schedules for local after school sports practice and offers up and constructs pick-up and drop-off routes based upon participation; a regular route to gather up the kids and deliver them. Accommodation for security will be considered when children are being transported without accompanying parents, such as real-time tracking and a constant open line of communication, both audio and video streaming from the vehicle to parent's smartphones.

The specific vehicle that arrives can be determined by number of passengers, whether you'll be transporting something large or just yourself, etc. The notion of owning, maintaining, accommodating parking requirements of, insuring, etc, a personal vehicle, for many people, has already begun to feel like 'the old paridigm.'

To create this infrastructure, you need route optimization software, that incorporates the real-time whereabouts of all vehicles in a local fleet. You need scheduling software. You need to deal with remaining charge/range of each vehicle out in service to know when a vehicle can accommodate an additional requested or scheduled route without running out of juice. You need to accommodate stand-by, where the vehicle drops someone off at a location and is requested to stand-by for an indeterminate time while the person goes into a store or bank to run an errand. In short, you need a very sophisticated set of interacting technologies to accommodate smooth operation of a transportation network that provides near immediate responsiveness to a population's constantly fluctuating needs.

If I were Tim Cook, this is exactly the way I'd envision the future, and this is what I'd set out to create. It's not so much about constructing vehicles yourself, but about getting sign-in from all vehicle manufacturers such that their vehicles can work within the envisioned transportation network. And that means that people who do own vehicles could lend them into their local autonomous transportation fleet in order to earn money (this has already been suggested by Musk and makes sense for a maker of vehicles to accommodate, as it helps him sell more Teslas direct to consumers). It means that new rental fleets will simply be staged in large metro areas, with one or more depots that the vehicles come back to for recharging, maintenance, cleaning, etc. And that means that there's a path forward for the rental companies, because they already have staging areas for their existing fleets. The big picture can be accommodated during a transition phase from the world we have today to a world where almost all transportation is shared and autonomous.

Extend this to trucking, inter-city bussing, etc, and the whole thing becomes a future that Apple could play a major role in developing. Without ever producing, on their own, a single vehicle.

Also key to this is that everything Apple needs to do to revolutionize transportation does not require Apple to do any work on autonomous driving, nor does Apple need to build a single vehicle model. Nope, Apple will want to own the end user interaction used to summon and schedule transportation, and it'll want to own the route optimization algorithms and server side scheduling and dispatch. And take a cut of every ride.

There will need to be some tech in each car to pick up the user interaction that began on a rider's smartphone or Watch, once the car arrives to pick up the rider. The car will need a voice interface to interact with the rider. The car will need to constantly ping its whereabouts to the dispatch and scheduling servers, along with its charge level, so that the dispatch system can determine its next pick up and determine when it needs to exit the active fleet and return to a nearby depot for recharging or maintenance. The car will need to contain sensors, like internal cameras, to monitor for left-behind packages, spilled coffee, etc, and report appropriately to riders or to dispatch. The car will need streaming audio/video capabilities to stream to parents when children are riding without adult accompaniment. All of this can be designed as a set of interfaces that automakers can implement in order to be compatible with Apple's dispatch and routing servers, and the vehicles might also be required to utilize Apple's mapping infrastructure.

Once verified as able to serve a ride request, the car is handed details on the location of the rider, and the rider's destination, and it can then utilize its own autonomous driving capabilities to serve the request. And all of this can integrate both driverless and human driven vehicles into the same service. So as vehicles are developed that are licensed for autonomous operation, these can be added to an existing Uber-like fleet of human driven vehicles, both serving together to form a centrally requested and directed/dispatched swarm serving a metrolitan area. Eventually, the human driven vehicles would all be replaced with autonomous vehicles, and the future will have arrived.

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