An autonomous Apollo Robotaxi from Baidu in Changsha, Central China's Hunan Province Photo: Courtesy of Baidu

Baidu plans to expand its robotaxi ride-hailing services across 30 cities in China in two to three years to serve a wider range of users. Robin Li, founder of Baidu, said at the 2021 ABC Summit held in Beijing on Thursday. 

"Our goal is to make travel cheaper than current online car-hailing," Li added. 

Baidu has been deploying autonomous driving solutions since 2013. After 8 years of development, Baidu has overcome core technologies such as operating systems, computing platforms, and perceptual control to achieve autonomous driving on complex urban roads and highways.

Baidu said on Wednesday that it opened the Apollo Park in Shanghai, following Beijing and Guangzhou. The 10 square kilometers area will be a hub for an intelligent connectivity ecosystem that will expand to 200 operating vehicles, becoming the largest autonomous driving fleet in East China.

The Beijing government said that it will officially open the self-driving high-speed test, allowing the first batch of companies to complete highway trials.

In the next 10 years there will be eight key technologies in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) that will profoundly change our society, namely autonomous driving, digital city operation, machine translation, biological computing, deep learning framework, knowledge management, AI chips and personal intelligent assistants, Li said.