Forum to discuss cooperation on future mobility

Chinese and German companies in the intelligent new energy vehicle industry will attend a forum in Zhongguancun Science City on Monday to discuss and demonstrate the achievements made in autonomous driving.

Regarding intelligent connectivity and NEVs as core to the competitiveness of the future mobility, the forum is set to invite industry insiders from both China and Germany to share their views on future mobility and cutting-edge mobility technologies, including autonomous driving and intelligent connected vehicles.

Zhongguancun Science City is a hub of high-tech companies, many of which specialize in developing future mobility solutions, and cooperate with German partners in autonomous driving and intelligent connected vehicles.

SureStar, founded in 2005, specializes in the development of LiDAR technology. LiDAR uses laser light to measure distances and map surroundings, and is commonly used in vehicles with autonomous driving capabilities.

SureStar is one of the few companies in the world to have a full range of high-definition LiDAR navigation and surveying systems.

The company is cooperating with Germany's BMW, Volkswagen and Bosch and providing them with its LiDAR products to use in their autonomous driving systems. The cooperation also involves extensive demonstration and testing.

LiangDao Intelligence is an intelligent testing and validation service provider headquartered in Beijing, with two research and development centers in Berlin and Munich in Germany.

LiangDao Intelligence develops Level 3 to Level 5 autonomous driving technologies. Level 3 autonomous driving requires little to no human intervention, while Level 5 is fully autonomous and requires no human interaction.

The 5-year-old startup is working to put these technologies into mass production and is currently cooperating with Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche.

Relying on its strong capability in LiDAR algorithm, autonomous driving verification and big data analysis, LiangDao became a supplier of Volkswagen at the beginning of 2019.

According to LiangDao Intelligence, the company will increase its cooperation with Volkswagen Group, especially in the fields of evaluating driving scenarios, multidimensional data source integration, scenario generation and cloud platforms for driving scenarios.

In August 2019, LiangDao received financial support from the Berlin government to invest into its R&D center in the German capital.

The government will provide 2.43 million euros ($2.86 million) over three years so that LiangDao can create 50 new R&D positions to boost local business and economic development.

Horizon Robotics, founded in 2015, is another startup from Zhongguancun Science City that cooperates with German companies such as Audi and Continental.

Making use of its star product－the Matrix autonomous driving computing platform－Horizon Robotics helped Audi conduct Level 4 autonomous driving and vehicle-road collaboration demonstration under actual highway scenarios at the beginning of this year.

The demonstration conducted on a highway involved three intelligent connected vehicles fitted with autonomous driving systems.

The vehicles were capable of autonomously adjusting their speed and changing lanes according to the speed limit, road work and traffic jams, and moving aside for high-priority vehicles such as ambulances.

Horizon Robotics is working with Audi in developing autonomous driving solutions, with the aim of creating a customized visual perception algorithm for Chinese driving scenarios.

In September 2018, Audi received approval for Level 4 autonomous driving road testing in Wuxi, East China's Jiangsu province.

The test cars were equipped with Horizon Robotics' hardware and software related to autonomous driving, according to Horizon Robotics.