This article was originally published by AI Frontier.
Blackberry is behind Baidu Apollo? Yeah, we didn’t get it backwards
Planning Editor | Natalie
Writing | AI Front Editorial Department
Blackberry Has signed an agreement with Chinese Internet giant Baidu inc to jointly develop self-driving vehicle technology, accelerating the pace of global automotive Oems and suppliers in deploying connected and autonomous vehicle technology.
Yes, you read it right, you understand it right, it’s the blackberry you know, the blackberry that sells phones.”
“Black lilies,” as we might call this seemingly bizarre combination.
Perhaps many people could not have expected that Baidu would cooperate with blackberry. What is more unimaginable is that the purpose of their cooperation is not to launch a mobile phone, but to develop Baidu’s Apollo program by taking advantage of blackberry’s technological advantages in the field of autonomous driving.
Are you confused again? Baidu? Blackberry? Or the technological edge in autonomous driving?
Read this article and you’ll see what’s going on.
When Baidu and blackberry came together
Blackberry has signed an agreement with Chinese Internet giant Baidu inc to jointly develop self-driving vehicle technology, accelerating the pace of global automotive Oems and suppliers in deploying connected and autonomous vehicle technology. Shares of blackberry jumped nearly 13 percent immediately after the announcement.
This cooperation aims to use blackberry’s industry-leading, ISO 26262 ASIL-D certified QNX security operating system as the basis of Baidu Apollo’s open platform for autonomous driving. In addition, blackberry and Baidu will work together to combine Baidu’s CarLife (China’s leading smartphone integration software for connected vehicles), conversational AI system DuerOS and HD maps on the blackberry QNX infotainment platform.
While blackberry has previously worked with companies interested in introducing QNX to autonomous driving systems, the tie-up with Baidu is notable because it means blackberry will enter China, the world’s largest auto market.
“Blackberry QNX has become a production-type operating system platform with security certification,” said Li Zhenyu, General Manager of Baidu’s Intelligent Driving Division. Our goal is to provide automakers with a clear and fast path to autonomous vehicle production, with physical and virtual security as a top priority. By combining the blackberry QNX operating system with the Apollo platform, we will help automakers move quickly from prototyping to production systems. “We are committed to driving the development of autonomous driving, intelligent connectivity and intelligent transportation systems related technologies and business ecosystems.”
John Wall, General Manager and Senior Vice President of QNX at blackberry, said, “Working with Baidu will give us the opportunity to explore the integration of multiple automotive subsystems including ADAS, infotainment, gateway and cloud services. “Baidu has made significant advances in artificial intelligence and deep learning, which will combine with high-definition maps, blackberry’s core security embedded software and security expertise to become a key component of autonomous vehicles.”
Why did Baidu go after blackberry?
Here is a summary quoted from “Shi Gaoba”, a netizen on Zhihu: Each takes what he needs. Baidu wants blackberry’s technical support (yes, you read that right), and blackberry wants Baidu’s future market and promotion in the field of autonomous driving.
Forget blackBerrys, people are betting on driverless cars
People’s impression of blackberry is basically that the smartphone once praised as the most secure in the world has fallen out of the market, which makes blackberry and Nokia tied for the first place and become the negative benchmark of the smartphone market which has been beaten for a long time. But after abandoning the phone market, blackberry didn’t go down in flames.
The Canadian company ditched its once-popular smartphone product to focus on the QNX. Blackberry plans to double the number of QNX engineers to about 1,000 over the next few years and build a $76 million self-driving car base near Ottawa.
Blackberry is entering a highly competitive field, including some of the world’s biggest technology companies that are investing in driverless cars.
In September, BlackBerry launched a series of marketing campaigns in Silicon Valley and Detroit, using the slogan “Is Your Car BlackBerry Secure? , aiming to promote their technology to protect driverless cars from hackers.
In an interview, blackberry CEO John Chen said that in the long term, “the automotive business is our best revenue driver.”
In recent years, blackberry has been looking for an opportunity to compete with Apple and Samsung in the smartphone market. Blackberry once had 80 million users of its email service, according to the company, but after companies allowed employees to use personal phones, the number of blackberry users began to decline, and its market value fell from C $79.5 billion in 2008 to C $3.24 billion in 2013.
Since last year, blackberry has turned its phones over to contract manufacturers, but Gantt’s research suggests its global market share is close to zero. The company’s other main business is mobile software, which accounts for most of the company’s profits, though analysts say growth in that business is slowing. Blackberry could use QNX to attract potential buyers, giving it a chance to turn things around. “Blackberry needs to release more driverless technology to gain a foothold in the market,” said Todd Coupland, an analyst at CIBC World Markets.
With its stock up 52% this year, investors may be taking notice.
In recent years, Samsung and Oracle have reportedly coveted blackberry patents on mobile, encryption and QNX. But with the support of major shareholders, Mr. Chen rebuffed some buyers.
According to a recent report from CIBC World Markets, there are already dozens of companies competing with QNX in the autonomous vehicle operating system space. Apple, Alphabet’s Waymo unit and Tesla use their own operating systems in their driverless cars. Toyota plans to use open source software technology in the future.
Blackberry’s QNX can process data collected from a driverless car’s sensors to help the car’s computer prioritize and make real-time decisions about which parts of the car need to move. Even if one part of the system fails, it can still ensure the normal operation of the car, which is an ideal feature of driverless cars. In addition, THE QNX system can protect the car computer from Trojan horse or rogue software intrusion, defense against distributed denial of service attacks.
In 2010, blackberry acquired QNX from Harman (acquired by Samsung this year) to enhance the BB10 operating system. The aim was to attract iPhone and Android users by adding more features, but the new device failed to deliver, so the company shifted engineering resources back to QNX to focus on automotive software.
The QNX unit now has a three-story office on the outskirts of Ottawa that houses hundreds of engineers and is littered with car parts. In the garage are a number of premium sedans, such as Lincoln MKZ and Mercedes AMG GLA45, equipped with the latest driverless technology for development and testing.
Although out of the public eye, the blackberry company has launched a complete intelligent connected vehicle electronic technology solution based on the QNX system acquired from Harman in 2010 and its own expertise in security and communication technology. Including QNX basic software platform, acoustic software development platform, domain controller architecture, digital instrument software development platform, Heypervisor platform, intelligent driving platform and so on, blackberry has long been the invisible king in the field of vehicle operating system, with a market share of more than 70%.
Today, blackberry is providing the most advanced network security technology to Oems around the world to protect their hardware, software, applications and end-to-end systems from cyber attacks. It has partnered with the world’s largest automotive chip suppliers, including three tier 1 automotive component suppliers – Bosch, Denso and Magna.
Some blackberry customers say QNX gives them a strong competitive edge because it already meets safety standards for driverless cars, the best result of blackberry’s heavy investment.
What does Baidu want to do?
The competition in the autonomous driving market is so fierce that domestic jingchi and Pony.ai have started trial operation in Guangzhou, and external Google has announced that they will start mass production of autonomous taxis in 2018. Of course, Baidu hopes that The Apollo program will be launched as soon as possible. Under the premise of rapid landing of Apollo program, Blackberry’S QNX system has become a good choice for Baidu. With the accumulation of QNX in autonomous driving system, Baidu can quickly build Apollo’s on-board software platform system and make its autonomous driving technology play a role in the embedded platform. Speed up real mass production (after all, it’s being said in front of the whole world) rather than continuing to run on industrial computers for the media and the masses to see and experience.
Zhihu netizens also believe that: From the perspective of BAT’s war on intelligent Vehicles, Baidu’s action this time belongs to the defensive follow-up of vehicle-mounted operating system, because Ali has developed AliOS and Tencent has WeOS, while Baidu’s DuerOS is not a vehicle-mounted operating system fundamentally. Its essence is a set of voice interaction system based on Duer. Therefore, they are eager to quickly enter the market with a partner who has rich experience in the field of vehicle operating system and has a certain market share.
What about the blackberry?
For blackberry, the phone market is the past, and the self-driving market is the future. In this cooperation, blackberry should pay more attention to Baidu’s great ambition and strategy in the field of autonomous driving, and hope to use Baidu’s resources and influence to open the Chinese market and take the lead in the field of autonomous driving.
Blackberry’s QNX system focuses on in-vehicle infotainment and has a considerable share in the international market. It is far superior to Android in terms of security and stability, and exceeds Linux in terms of customization development. However, QNX is not capable of integrating in-vehicle infotainment and ADAS system in the future. Only by finding a partner who can hold up half of the sky in intelligent driving can IT survive in the foreseeable future, and Baidu is the most advanced among BAT in the field of intelligent driving.
Baidu’s ROS and blackberry’s QNX
In 2017, Baidu announced Apollo as an open source, and after seeing the basic configuration, Apollo was mocked for using ROS as an autonomous driving operating system. ROS! ROS!
ROS: Robot operating system
ROS is a powerful and flexible robot programming framework. From the perspective of software architecture, ROS is a distributed multi-process framework based on messaging communication. Alibaba has developed AliOS, Tencent has WebOS, and Baidu has ROS, an open source platform for robotic systems. Different from common electronic products such as mobile phones, the automatic driving system of cars is a Safety critical system. The occasional failure or failure of the system directly threatens the Safety of people. Therefore, the whole system must pass the strict certification of the third party before it can be applied to cars. Android, Linux, ROS and other large and complex open source operating systems have zero chance of passing security certification.
In addition, ROS systems are not designed as a platform for autonomous driving, so there are some things that need to be improved. ROS application in autonomous driving has the basic defects of single point of failure, bandwidth congestion, message does not support forward compatibility and security issues.
To address these problems, Baidu has improved communication performance optimization, decentralized network topology, data compatibility expansion and other functions on the basis of the original ROS. In fact, the automotive operating system is mainly divided into two camps. One is the traditional car dealers, whose line is commercial products and has always believed in smooth transition products. The other group is the industry interloper, such as Waymo and Tesla, who has the ability to lay out their OS solutions early, while most other companies opt for deeply customized solutions with Ubuntu +ROS to speed up their development. Once the basics were met, it was understandable that Apollo would go back to QNX, a commercial operating system that was not open source.
QNX: Real time operating system for real vehicle safety
QNX had served the automotive industry for years before blackberry acquired rTOS, founded in 1980, seven years ago. Many well-known automobile manufacturers, including Audi, Ford, BMW, Mercedes Benz, Toyota, Gm Buick and so on, have used QNX system. At present, more than 60 million cars and 240 kinds of models are equipped with this software in the world. After buying QNX, blackberry tried to use it to build its own mobile operating platform, but after several unsuccessful attempts, it continued to build QNX into in-car systems.
Blackberry’S QNX solution revolves around two key words: safety and security. The difference between the two is that the former focuses on the safety of car functions to prevent failures, while the latter emphasizes access to car software to prevent data intrusion. Blackberry QNX is also the world’s first hard real-time operating system certified with the Functional safety ASIL D rating. QNX is almost the preferred LCD instrument operating system in the automotive industry. And QNX’s on-board real-time operating system is far more secure than Android and Linux.
We have Linux on the top left, blackberry QNX on the top right, and Android on the bottom right
QNX code quality is also very good, to meet the quality requirements of on-board software, small kernel, rich peripheral and not too much redundancy.
That’s all. It’s lighter than air
Embattled: Baidu’s friends and rivals
I believe many readers still remember Lu Qi’s speech at CES 2018 a month ago:
“Apollo is an example of ‘China Speed’, showing the rapid pace of China’s innovation and development in the global autonomous driving industry. Ai and innovation are borderless, and we are facing a historic moment of tremendous opportunity for people around the world, which requires joint leadership and exploration by major countries and enterprises, including China and Baidu. We are very excited to be at the center of this massive innovation and to stand with each of our partners at this important time.”
Today’s Baidu is well aware of the importance of partnership, so expanding cooperation is a necessary path. In a press release, Baidu announced that Apollo has gathered more than 90 partners, including nvidia, Udacity, Microsoft and other well-known global companies. Baidu hopes to cooperate with these companies to bring their strengths together and make Apollo platform develop in a comprehensive and balanced way.
To better support overseas autonomous driving participants, Baidu announced a partnership with Microsoft in which Apollo will provide autonomous driving services to global partners outside Of China based on the Azure cloud. In addition, the two sides have also carried out cooperation on intelligent connectivity and autonomous driving to advance technology and deepen strategic layout.
To improve the accuracy of self-driving maps, Baidu has partnered with TomTom, a world-renowned map manufacturer. The two sides will explore the application of artificial intelligence, deep learning and other technologies in high-precision maps, to further improve the accuracy and productivity of high-precision maps, enhance the safety of autonomous driving, and speed up the landing of autonomous driving.
Faced with a huge talent shortage, Baidu and Udacity jointly launched the online Apollo autonomous driving online course, which is free and open to the world, hoping to use talent to promote technological progress and drive the rapid development of the industry.
From these simple examples above, it is not difficult to see that Baidu Apollo is pursuing a “fast” word. Part of the reason is Robin Li’s announcement at baidu’s Global conference that “self-driving cars will be mass-produced in 2018.” More importantly, China’s emerging autonomous driving market has become increasingly dangerous.
First, let’s talk about wang Jin, who broke up with Baidu in an unhappy way. After leaving Baidu, Wang Jin ran to the United States and still did his old job: automatic driving. As the former general manager of Baidu autonomous Driving Business Division, Wang Jin has accumulated enough experience before leaving Baidu. In December 2017, Jingchi Technology, which focuses on autonomous driving, announced that it would move its headquarters back from the United States to Guangzhou, China, to build the first large-scale industrialization company of unmanned driving in China. According to Jingchi, 500 to 1,000 self-driving cars will be mass-produced throughout the year, starting from the first quarter of 2018.
Not to mention the performance of Jingchi’s self-driving car, just the 2018 mass production of this one, baidu can make a case, plus CEO Wang Jin and Baidu have such a relationship, Baidu’s rival looks tough.
Besides Jingchi, there is another rising star in China’s autonomous driving scene: Tulsen Future.
The company focus on automated driving the truck to the ground, it is also a lot of companies are trying to research the direction of the automatic driving, in November 2016, signed a strategic cooperation agreement, baidu and faw liberation to promote commercial vehicle intelligent, almost at the same time, baidu smart car division level (L3) and foton Shanghai unveiled a nobody trucks, Sinotruk and others are also stepping up research and development.
Around the world, Uber’s Otto, Google’s Waymo, Tesla, Daimler and Volvo are all working on self-driving trucks.
Domestic new army revolt, foreign veterans look at fiercely, Baidu’s current situation can be said to be ambushed on all sides, under siege on all sides, technology, talent, market one can not slow down, fast-paced layout and attack, Baidu driving this Apollo to break through success?
Bottom line: An unexpected partnership has brought back blackberry, an old tech company that had all but disappeared from view, and renewed interest in the company in an unexpected area. Baidu dragged blackberry over, let blackberry this old factory again “active” up, “black Lily” can in the autonomous driving lake blossom what kind of fantastic magnificent flowers, we are excited to look forward to.
References:
[1] www.wsj.com/articles/fo…
[2] www.zhihu.com/question/26…
[3] www.forbes.com/sites/great…
www.berrylink.cn/2018/01/04/…
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