Recently, Pony.ai, a company in the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Area (BDA), took the lead in the new year, aimed at vehicle-level mass production. It released new systems and solutions, the next-generation autonomous driving system, and self-developed vehicle-level computing unit solutions.

Pony.ai revealed for the first time the exterior design, sensor and computing platform solutions of the sixth-generation autonomous driving software and hardware system designed for L4 vehicle-level mass production on Jan 20. 

Autonomous driving vehicle fleet [Photo/kfqgw.beijing.gov.cn]

The first batch of models equipped with the system will start road tests in China this year, and will be put into daily operation in the first half of 2023.

Compared with the previous generation, Pony.ai's new-generation autonomous driving software and hardware system continues to follow the technical route of multi-sensor deep fusion, and has been fully upgraded in the direction of mass production in terms of the number and selection of sensors. 

Self-driving test car [Photo/kfqgw.beijing.gov.cn]

For the first time, the solid-state lidar is adopted on a large scale, the total number of sensors reaches 23, of which the resolution of the self-developed signal light recognition camera increased by 1.5 times.

Meanwhile, Pony.ai's in-depth research and development of core hardware will be reflected in the new-generation system - this mass-production-level system solution adopts Pony.ai's self-developed vehicle-grade L4 autonomous driving computing unit, and introduces the  NVIDIA DRIVE Orin system-level (SoC) chip, which has higher performance, higher bandwidth, and lower latency.