Didi’s KargoBot Reaches Strategic Partnership with Horizon Robotics

On April 19, during the Shanghai Auto Show, Didi‘s autonomous trucking division KargoBot announced a strategic partnership with Chinese tech firm Horizon Robotics.

Both companies will develop unmanned driving truck domain controllers based on Horizon Robotics’ Journey series chips, which feature high performance, reliability, and redundancy capabilities to meet the computing power requirements of L4-level autonomous driving systems for high-speed data processing, real-time environmental perception, and real-time intelligent decision-making. This will help provide safer and smoother transportation services for autonomous trucks.

Horizon Robotics will provide high-performance vehicle-mounted intelligent chips to achieve high integration and computing power. KargoBot, as a company incubated by Didi’s autonomous driving division, will provide efficient algorithms and stable software support for domain controllers based on its deep accumulation in the field of autonomous driving technology.

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The first jointly developed automatic driving domain controller is expected to be mass-produced in 2024 and installed on KargoBot’s first mass-produced model. The domain controller will design multi-layer safety redundancy at the hardware, algorithm, and software layers to further improve the safety of self-driving trucks.

KargoBot has built a hybrid unmanned solution suitable for bulk cargo transportation. Its core product is the mixed-intelligence formation system KargoOne. The system consists of a human-driven vehicle equipped with autonomous driving features, accompanied by multiple L4-level self-driving trucks. Together, they are capable of providing end-to-end logistics transportation across short, medium, and long distances in complex scenarios.

In addition, Kargobot also released its hybrid capacity intelligent dispatch platform, KargoCloud, which can further improve the operational efficiency of goods transport scheduling. As of now, more than 350 trucks have been connected to this platform, which schedules logistics business worth over 300 million yuan ($43.6 million) annually.