Using lidar, the NGP technology of P5 city in Tucki is interpreted.

　　[car home Electric Vehicle Technology] Recently, engineers in Xpeng Motors released two videos of real vehicle road test of NGP(Navigation Guided Pilot) in P5 city, Tucki in their circle of friends. Tucki P5 is expected to be officially launched in September, and the NGP function of the city should not be pushed to the users’ cars that have purchased the optional package through OTA air upgrade until the first quarter of next year. Tucki has previously equipped its P7 with two high-level driving assistance functions, namely, high-speed NGP navigation assisted driving and VPA parking lot memory parking. The city NGP took the lead in carrying the Tucki P5 model, which greatly increased the application scope and competitiveness of the driver assistance system. Let’s take a closer look at the technical highlights of NGP, a city to be launched in Tucki.

● What model of Tucki P5 has the function of city NGP?

　　According to the configuration table of Tucki official website, only P550P and 600P models can be equipped with city NGP function. The lower-priced 550E model is not equipped with lidar hardware, so it cannot be equipped with the city NGP function. For detailed vehicle model parameter comparison, please refer to the following table:

● The key to realize urban NGP-lidar

　　The lidar on Tucki P5 comes from Livox Lanwo. Livox Lanwo Technology is an independent company established by DJI DJI Innovation. It is committed to providing high-performance and low-cost lidar sensors, which are used in many industries such as autonomous driving, smart cities and mobile robots.

　　The detection distance of the radar is about 150 meters, the field of view angle is 120 (horizontal) X 25° (vertical), the equivalent point cloud density is 144 lines, the angular resolution is 0.2 (horizontal) X 0.3° (vertical), the data volume is 400,000 points/second, and the equivalent frame rate is 20Hz.

　　Compared with millimeter-wave radar, HAP lidar is not inferior in detection distance, and at the same time, it describes the environment more delicately, and can better detect small target objects such as pedestrians, bicycles, ice cream buckets and so on. Compared with the camera, which has certain requirements for light, lidar can work well at night when the light is dim.

More exciting videos are all on the car home video platform.
"『Livox Browsing HAP Lidar Target Recognition Display Video"

　　At the same time, Livox HAP lidar has the function of selecting ROI(Region Of Interest), which can select a specific area in the field of view in front of the lidar for high-precision scanning, and obtain higher-precision environmental information, which is conducive to improving the recognition accuracy of obstacles. The aforementioned 20Hz equivalent frame rate refers to the scanning frequency of ROI area. Specifically, when the lidar scans the entire field of view at 10Hz, the scanning frequency of the ROI area is 20Hz.

　　It is this non-repetitive scanning mode that enables HAP lidar to reach the point cloud density of 144-line traditional mechanical lidar at the scanning frequency of 10Hz (that is, the scanning period of 0.1s). This is the origin of the equivalent point cloud density of line 144.

　　This is similar to the fact that the human eye can see the object in the center of the field of vision more clearly (there is a place called fovea in the central area of human retina, where cone cells correspond to bipolar cells one by one, and the vision in this area is the most acute and accurate). So some people call this characteristic of biprism lidar "retina-like characteristic".

　　The advantage of using this laser is that the hardware manufacturing cost is low, but the laser penetration is weak, and it is relatively disturbed by sunlight. At the same time, due to the high laser energy of 905nm wavelength, it may harm human eyes, so more protective measures need to be applied to the laser radar. Although the laser radar with the wavelength of 1550nm is more powerful and the laser is safer, it is still too expensive at present. Therefore, for civil cars, the laser radar with 905nm wavelength is still the cost-effective choice at present.

　　Although Livox HAP lidar also has rotating parts inside, compared with traditional mechanical lidar (the transmitting module, receiving module and lens of traditional mechanical lidar are all rotating). The laser transmitting and receiving parts of Livox HAP lidar are fixed, only the prism is moving, and the non-repetitive scanning mode is adopted, so its reliability and stability are more guaranteed and calibration is simpler.

● How can lidar help NGP in P5 city of Tucki?

　　Tucki P5 has 2 lidar, 5 millimeter-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic radars, 4 panoramic cameras, 9 high-perception cameras and high-precision GPS. Compared with P7, P5 has one less high-sensitivity camera, but two more lidar. The newly added HAP lidar is the key to realize the application of urban NGP.

　　In the face of typical working conditions encountered by urban NGP (such as crossroads, right-turn lanes, U-turn lanes, etc.), HAP lidar has more advantages than millimeter-wave radar. Compared with the camera, lidar is much more accurate in identifying static obstacles and less affected by illumination, which is one of the important reasons why urban NGP must introduce lidar.

　　As the saying goes, the industry is specialized, and HAP lidar can’t effectively identify road signs, such as lane separation lines and various guiding arrows. It is also impossible to distinguish the speed limit sign from the traffic light status information. This happens to be the strength of the camera. Therefore, every environmental recognition sensor on Tucki P5 has its own significance. They play their own strengths and cooperate with each other to effectively improve the target detection ability and vehicle perception performance in low light conditions, and realize the optimization of NGP function user experience.

● Xavier domain controller in NVIDIA.

　　Xavier domain controller has been applied to mass production P7 vehicles, and the high-speed NGP and VPA parking memory function running on this "brain" have remarkable performance. P5 will continue to use Xavier domain controller as the computing core of city NGP, which shows that the computing power of this domain controller is recognized by Tucki. In the future, P7 with Xavier domain controller will have a great chance to increase the function of urban NGP by adding laser radar.

　　After all, these are all driver assistance systems, and drivers still need to monitor the environmental conditions when using them. The existence of human drivers actually shares a lot of computing power needs. Self-driving vehicles need to deal with all kinds of emergencies without being taken over, so they need a lot of computational redundancy. It’s like someone spending 10,000 yuan to buy a computer that can play 3A games. In fact, most of the time is just spent typing, surfing the Internet and watching videos.

　　Tucki has the full-stack self-research capability of intelligent driving system, and has researched the visual perception, sensor fusion, planning, positioning, decision-making, control and other aspects of the vehicle, and formed a full closed loop of data and algorithms.

　　The competition for hardware computing power will continue, and Tucki will not be left behind. On the track of software iteration, Tucki has accumulated obvious advantages in the industry by virtue of closed-loop data and algorithm and full-stack self-research ability. This is also the most important core competitiveness of Tucki’s future car products.