Baidu's self-driving tech plans revealed

In the race to develop self-driving technology, Chinese Internet giant Baidu unveiled its 50 partners in an open source development program, revised its timeline for introducing autonomous driving capabilities on open city roads, described the Project Apollo consortium and its goals, and declared Apollo to be the'Android of the autonomous driving industry'. At a developer's conference last week in Beijing, Baidu described its plans and timetable for its self-driving car technology. It will start test-driving in restricted environments immediately, before gradually introducing fully autonomous driving capabilities on highways and open city roads by 2020. Baidu's goal is to get those vehicles on the roads in China, the world's biggest auto market, with the hope that the same technology, embedded in exported Chinese vehicles, can then conquer the United States. To do so, Baidu has compiled a list of cooperative partners, a consortium of 50 public and private entities, and named it Apollo, after NASA's massive Apollo moon-landing program. The program is making its autonomous car software open source in the same way that Google released its Android operating system for smartphones.