Strength Out Of The Circle! From Huawei's 'no Car' Behind The Interpretation Of The New Strength Of LiDAR

Huawei's cell phone business has shrunk significantly due to the supply of cell phone chips. Research organization Counterpoint released the first quarter of 2021 global smartphone sales data show that Huawei's cell phone shipments fell 18%, the global market share of only 4%.

 

On the other hand, the communications equipment business is also facing varying degrees of extrusion in overseas markets, and business shrinkage is inevitable. In addition to the risk of being sanctioned on the geopolitical front, there's also the fate of more business lines such as Hesse and Hongmeng to consider. Huawei must make a choice as soon as possible to make up for the profits lost in the cell phone section.

 

At this time, Huawei chose to kill into the field of intelligent cars is considered a breakout battle, and LiDAR technology is an important combatant in this breakout battle. By scattering laser light around and receiving reflected signals, according to the flight time of the laser return to determine whether there are obstacles around, as well as the location and even the volume of obstacles and generate point cloud diagrams. This technology is very accurate in detecting objects, even down to the millimeter. The new models from brands such as Xiaopeng, ARCFOX, and Azera, all together emphasize that they will be equipped with LiDAR. LiDAR has also become a new trend in realizing autonomous driving technology.

Image source | website Cool Hailo

 

On the evening of April 17, BAIC New Energy Automobile's high-end brand, ARCFOX, announced the launch of Alpha S, whose intelligent cockpit is equipped with the Hongmeng OS operating system. At the same time, ARCFOX also released the Huawei HI version of the Alpha S equipped with Huawei's high-level self-driving ADS system, which is equipped with a full set of high-level self-driving solutions provided by Huawei, and is also the first intelligent electric vehicle equipped with Huawei's LIDAR program. Immediately after that, during the Shanghai Auto Show on April 20, Huawei sold an SUV from Celis in its offline stores, which is equipped with Huawei's electric drive system, audio technology and IoT system.

 

When a giant with annual revenue of more than $800 billion, annual R&D investment of nearly $100 billion, net profit of $60 billion, and cash reserves of up to $200 billion kills its way into the automotive market, it obviously stirs up a thousand waves.

 

From the current point of view, Huawei chose to stay in the upper reaches, to do a smart electric car era of "Bosch" - "smart car solutions" upstream suppliers, can be understood as Huawei Inside (HI). "HI" is Huawei's brand of smart car solutions released in October 2020, which includes a new smart car digital architecture and 5 smart systems - LIDAR, smart cockpit, smart driving, smart internet, smart electric, and smart cloud - and more than 30 intelligent systems.

 

Through cooperation with domestic automobile brands, Huawei has successfully commercialized the full set of Huawei HI intelligent car solutions, including LIDAR, Huawei's chips, Hongmeng system, and autonomous driving technology, in the entire vehicle, and will further enhance Huawei's autonomous driving capabilities with the increase in the number of models on the road.

 

Huawei rotating chairman Xu Zhijun emphasized that Huawei does not build cars, but will BAIC, Changan and Guangzhou Automobile to "Huawei Inside" way of cooperation, respectively, to create three sub-brands, and BAIC cooperation is one of the ARCFOX.

 

Huawei's entry into the automotive industry and the possibility of commercial landing mode, we will leave aside for the time being. In this article, we will sort out what Huawei's core technologies in the automotive field, in which we use the "LiDAR" technology to attract jade, but also welcome industry insiders to share with us more and more comprehensive expertise.

 

 

On April 18, Huawei released five new HI products, including 4D imaging radar, Hongmeng OS intelligent cockpit, intelligent driving computing platform MDC 810, "Huawei Octopus" open platform for autonomous driving, and intelligent thermal management system.

 

1. 4D Imaging Radar and Lidar

Image source | website Cool Hailo

 

It is understood that the Alpha S Huawei HI version will be equipped with three 96-line automotive-grade LiDAR, six millimeter-wave radar, 12 cameras, 13 ultrasonic radar, and Huawei chips with an arithmetic power of up to 352 Tops.

 

In terms of the development route of various types of technology, automotive LiDAR is developing in the direction of solid state and higher beams; automotive millimeter wave radar is developing in the direction of 4D imaging radar with more channels and higher resolution; and automotive cameras are developing in the direction of higher definition and more number of deployments.

 

Lidar part, Huawei in December 2020 officially released 96-line automotive-grade lidar, the lidar has a 120°× 25°field of view, enough to cope with urban areas, high speed and other scenes such as people, vehicle detection requirements, the full field of view range of up to 150 meters; at the same time in the full field of view, the horizontal and vertical beams are uniformly distributed, there is no splicing, jitter and so on, the formation of a stable point cloud for the back-end sensing The algorithm is more friendly.

 

As a vehicle-grade product, this LIDAR is small in size and suitable for the needs of front-loaded mass-production models, and a car configured with three LIDARs can basically achieve 360° coverage without dead angles. At the same time, Huawei has also established the first automotive-grade LiDAR Pilot production line, according to the annual production capacity of 100,000 sets / line in the advancement of the current price of roughly hundreds of dollars, the future is expected to reduce the price of LiDAR to 100-200 U.S. dollars. The release of Huawei's automotive-grade high-performance LiDAR is expected to break the cost bottleneck of high-level automated driving mass production. According to Huawei, its high-resolution 4D imaging radar was pre-researched in 2017, and it was not formally developed until 2019, and the first road test was completed in 2020, and this year Huawei's high-resolution 4D imaging radar has been formally mass-produced, and the first batch of shipments exceeded 1 million.

 

For self-driving cars, the synergy of LiDAR, cameras, millimeter wave radar and high-precision maps can achieve better results, which has also become the consensus of the self-driving industry. In Huawei's view, at least three high-beam LIDARs, 12 8-megapixel HD cameras, and six high-resolution 4D millimeter-wave radars are required to achieve high-level autonomous driving. Wang Jun, president of Huawei's Intelligent Vehicle Solutions BU, also said that Huawei will push millimeter-wave radar to replace low-beam LIDAR, allowing LIDAR technology to move up the ladder in order to achieve widespread deployment of both types of radar.

 

Huawei rotating chairman Xu Zhijun recently said publicly at the Huawei 2021 Global Analysts Conference that Huawei is able to do 1,000 kilometers of autonomous driving without intervention in urban areas, which is already much better than what Tesla has done. Industry analysts analyze that with the continuous innovation of technology and cost reduction, LiDAR still has incomparable advantages in the field of high-level automatic driving.

 

At present, the challenge in front of Huawei is the ability to balance the cost, whether large-scale mass production, will become an important factor in whether Huawei can go farther in this market. After adopting the more costly LiDAR, Huawei has shown that it is not inferior to Tesla.

 

2. Hongmeng OS Smart Cockpit

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At the HDC 2020 conference, Huawei officially released the Hongmeng OS 2.0 system, and then Huawei launched the Hongmeng OS 2.0 version for cars. The smart cockpit solution released by Huawei this time is precisely based on the Hongmeng OS car operating system, which supports a variety of applications such as one-core multi-screen, multi-user concurrency, runtime deterministic guarantee, distributed peripherals, in-vehicle network & multi-component, and provides functions such as differentiated startup recovery, multi-user switching, extremely fast startup, sound field control, and multi-component collaboration.

 

Huawei said that the Hongmeng OS Smart Cockpit solution will uphold the principle of neutrality and openness, focusing on the computing platform, Hongmeng OS car operating system and core services, display platform, and software and hardware ecosystems, and through openness and enablement, it will help car companies, tier-1 suppliers, and application partners to develop services and functions that satisfy users' needs and experiences.

 

3.Intelligent Driving Computing Platform MDC 810

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MDC (Mobile Data Center) is positioned as a computing platform for intelligent driving, containing a standardized series of hardware products, AOS (intelligent driving operating system), HOS (intelligent cockpit operating system) and VOS (intelligent vehicle control operating system), as well as the MDC core, a supporting toolchain and vehicle-road-cloud collaboration services, which support component servicing, interface standardization, and development tooling to meet the needs of vehicle manufacturers. The MDC platform supports component servicing, interface standardization, and development tooling, and meets vehicle-grade safety requirements.

 

The MDC platform supports L2 to L5 levels of intelligent driving, and different intelligent driving applications can be developed for different application scenarios. in February 2020, Huawei's MDC intelligent driving computing platform passed the ISO 26262 automotive functional safety management certification, which means that Huawei's related products can meet the high safety and reliability requirements of the automotive industry.

Figure | Gradual Evolution of Intelligent Driving Development Stages

 

Huawei's MDC products will be used by automobile companies as individually supplied automated driving components, and are currently the first to be mass-produced and marketed in the ARCFOX Alpha S. Subsequently, there will be more and more new models equipped with different MDC series products that will be mass-produced and marketed one after another.

 

4. Huawei Octopus Open Platform for Autonomous Driving

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"Huawei Octopus Open Platform for Automated Driving is a data-driven, closed-loop open platform that covers the core business needs of automated driving, including data, models, algorithms, training, simulation, labeling, and high-precision maps. It is committed to assisting automobile enterprises in building automatic driving development capabilities from a zero base through one-stop cloud services such as vehicle-cloud collaboration and virtual simulation, lowering the development threshold and improving development efficiency.

 

Huawei said that going to the cloud is a must for autonomous driving from development to commercialization, to ensure that vehicles can access the cloud nearby in all regions, and to easily solve the coverage, security, and elasticity scaling problems faced by commercialization. With the increase in data volume, developers will no longer have to worry about dedicated lines in the server room or upgrading and expanding capacity, and will focus on core algorithm development. Currently, Huawei's Octopus platform has integrated 20 million labeled datasets, 200,000 scene library data, a complete tool chain, preset algorithms, digital twins of real scenes, virtual-reality hybrid simulation, massively parallel simulation, and Huawei's high-precision maps, so that car companies can conduct algorithmic research and development directly on these bases.

 

5. Intelligent thermal management system

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The "three electric systems" have always been the core of electric vehicles. In order to pursue a minimalist architecture, higher efficiency, and a better driving experience, it is necessary to thermally manage motors, electronic controls, and batteries.

 

According to relevant organizations, the penetration rate of heat pumps will triple between 2020 and 2025. Traditional heat pump solutions have complex systems, numerous pipelines, poor environmental adaptability (can't be used below -10°C), and low intelligence (calibration and other work relies on manual labor), which seriously affects the efficiency and application of the heat pump system.

 

For power batteries, Huawei has introduced an intelligent thermal management system, which, through integrated design, component and control integration, and other innovative technologies, can reduce the operating temperature of the heat pump from the industry's -10°C to -18°C, increasing the range of new energy vehicles by 20%, solving the thermal management problems faced by the battery system, and realizing three major enhancements in environmental adaptability, calibration efficiency, and user experience.

 

 

In addition to the 5 HI new products mentioned above, in the automotive field, Huawei also has layouts for ADS high-level autonomous driving systems, autonomous driving map data systems, fast charging solutions, intelligent electric solutions, intelligent network solutions, and intelligent vehicle cloud solutions.

 

LiDAR will welcome the spring days

 

Over the past few years, Huawei has communicated with almost all automobile manufacturers, understanding that the automobile industry needs ICT technology more, and hoping to build future-oriented smart car products with Huawei's capabilities in ICT. As early as 2018, Huawei made clear its strategy of "Huawei does not build cars, but helps car companies build good cars", and this decision has remained unchanged until now. Huawei has made the decision to only empower the automotive industry, become an upper tier supplier, and provide support for tens of millions of cars and markets in the future.

 

Currently, there are almost no traditional automobile factories that are equipped with LIDAR, self-driving chips, computing platforms, maps, and other capabilities at the same time. In the face of the trends of upgrading and transforming the traditional automotive industry, upgrading consumer consumption, saving lives, and popularizing the right to equal mobility, Huawei will become the "automotive brain" that enables autonomous driving through chip-level innovation, platform-level engineering capabilities, and a perfect chain of development, testing, and diagnostic tools, so as to equip the traditional automotive industry with intelligent AI engines, and work with automotive manufacturers to help automotive manufacturers develop and implement their own AI engines. The company will become the "automotive brain" that enables autonomous driving, equipping the traditional automotive industry with an intelligent AI engine, and working together with automobile manufacturers to help autonomous driving enter the fast lane.

 

As one of the important parts of the intelligent electric vehicle sensors, LiDAR has more advantages than the vision system, and with the increase of the safety factor of automatic driving in the future, the demand for LiDAR will be greatly increased. At present, China's LiDAR industry chain has been perfected. 2021, a number of car companies launched new models equipped with LiDAR, and announced the mass production plan, LiDAR industry ushered in the development of opportunities.

Figure | LIDAR industry is more complete

Source: Official website of each company, Open Source Securities Research Institute

 

According to Sullivan's forecast, the global LiDAR market is expected to reach $13.54 billion in 2025. The domestic market Sullivan expects China's LiDAR market size to reach $4.31 billion in 2025, with a compound growth rate of 63.1% from 2019-2025, of which the automotive field is the main component.