Baidu, China’s most popular search engine, like its US-based
counterpart Google, is heavily investing in autonomous driving
technologies and today it officially announced the launch of a
self-driving car R&D center in Silicon Valley, right in Google’s
backyard.
The company expects its team will grow to over 100
researchers and engineers by the end of the year. The company already
moved several of its staff from its newly-created Autonomous Driving
Unit (ADU) to Sunnyvale and recently hired a Tesla Autopilot software
engineer.
Liang Heng, a PhD graduate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, joined Tesla’s Autopilot team last year
after CEO Eon Musk called for “hardcore software engineers” to join the
company’s effort to make the next generation of Autopilot fully
autonomous. Now he leaves the automaker only 5 months later to join
Baidu’s autonomous driving team as a ‘Software Architect’.
Prior to joining Tesla, Heng was working at Google on Street
View. Coincidently, the man in charge of Baidu’s Autonomous Driving
Unit (ADU), Jing Wang, is also formerly from Google.
Wang commented on the launch of the new R&D center:“Baidu is fully committed to making self-driving cars a reality. Autonomous vehicles will save lives and make transportation more efficient. Baidu’s Silicon Valley car team will play a significant role in building the car of the future.”
Baidu says that the team will include machine learning
researchers as well as hardware and software engineers across a variety
of technical domains, from robotics and computer vision to onboard
computers and sensors. The company will also be looking for
engineers with experience in the automotive industry.
Its Sunnyvale offices are already full of AI and machine
learning experts led by Andrew Ng, the founder and lead scientist of
Google’s Deep Learning project. He is now Chief Scientist for Baidu in
Silicon Valley.
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