On May 15, the 3rd WIC kicked off in Tianjin. As a leader in autonomous driving, HoloMatic was invited to demonstrate HoloPilot, its series production-ready automated highway pilot solution. Dr. Kai Ni, founder and CEO of HoloMatic, was invited to deliver keynote speech.

HoloMatic was invited to demonstrate HoloPilot

The 3rd WIC was hosted by National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, Cyberspace Administration, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Engineering, China Association for Science and Technology and Tianjin Municipal People’s Government.

84 teams sent by universities and enterprises inside and outside China participated in the World Intelligent Driving Challenge, a key component of the WIC and the most internationally authoritative competition in the industry, which was organized by China Automotive Technology and Research Center Corporation, China Association of Productivity Promotion Centers, CAAI Intelligent Driving Committee and Dongli District People’s Government of Tianjin.

In the competition, autonomous driving companies were invited to demonstrate their cutting-edge research outcomes and applications. HoloMatic was the only company invited to demonstrate autonomous driving on highway.

What HoloMatic demonstrated was HoloPilot, an automated highway pilot solution developed independently in house. In the demonstration, the vehicle with HoloPilot ran 15 km on Ningjing Highway in Tianjin. The vehicle performed a series of maneuvers successfully including lane keeping, vehicle following and active lane change, and coped with emergencies such as traffic jam and failure of the vehicle in front, which set the stage for the fantastic competition.

Showcase of Vehicle Equipped with HoloPilot

The vehicle equipped with HoloPilot looks exactly the same as other mass-produced vehicles and, in contrast with other autonomous vehicles in the competition, there is no lidar with a large number of channels fitted on top of the vehicle. The unique look of the vehicle attracted the attention of numerous participants and professionals in the competition. As HoloPilot is designed to be a series production-ready solution, it only uses low-cost and automotive-grade devices. Take sensor for example, the system chooses to integrate multiple cost-effective sensors including camera, millimeter wave radar and lidar with few channels, rather than expensive lidar with a large number of channels, which will accelerate the mass application of the solution.

Kai Ni, founder and CEO of HoloMatic, said that HoloMatic has initiated extensive road testing on highway. In April this year, HoloMatic completed a long-range test on Beijing-Shanghai Highway with a total mileage of 2400 km, in which HoloPilot performed several difficult maneuvers including driving in darkness and going through tunnel. In addition, HoloMatic was granted an ICV road testing license of Jiangsu Province and became the first company in China that had passed the highway testing for autonomous driving.

HoloMatic’s road test on Beijing-Shanghai Highway

Kai Ni said that extensive road testing has been a must-do before the series production of an autonomous driving system. An autonomous driving system should test its algorithms in the real-world road conditions and should collect data and train algorithms in a range of special and extreme scenarios to accelerate the upgrades of the system and to make the system more intelligent and secure.

At the World Intelligent Driving Forum, Dr. Kai Ni delivered keynote speech entitled “Pathway and Strategy for the Series Production of Autonomous Driving in China”. In the speech, Dr. Ni said that HoloMatic has been committed to developing and upgrading series production-ready solutions since the very beginning. He added that the aim of HoloMatic is to realize autonomous driving and automated operation without any human intervention in L3 and L4 use cases based on big data, artificial intelligence and automotive technologies. The company has introduced two autonomous driving solutions so far: HoloPilot, an automated highway pilot solution, and HoloParking, a smart valet parking solution to address the issue of “the last mile”.

Keynote by Dr. Kai Ni at the World Intelligent Driving Forum