Lei Gang from Aofei Temple
Quantum Bit Report | Public Account QbitAI

A joke that started to quietly gain popularity in the second half of 2019 has become more and more popular as it spreads.

The later version is this:

Uncle Yu, Yu Qian, the "Queen of Deyun", is also going to engage in autonomous driving entrepreneurship, and has also poached young talents from Google's driverless cars, starting another story of crossing over from the crosstalk world to a technology entrepreneurship.

Even IDG, a well-known investment institution whose address is close to Deyun Club, heard the news and took timely action, quickly providing angel round investment.

Hahahaha... maybe one day it will really be written into a crosstalk skit by Guo Degang and Yu Qian.

However, the reason why this rumor became more and more outrageous is that it is not groundless.

Some of the core information is even accurate - there really is a Yu Qian, he is indeed a member of the Waymo talent team, and IDG also provided investment.

Waymo originates from QINGZHOU Zhihang

Yu Qian, Wang Kun, Hou Cong and Da Fang.

These are the four young Waymo talents who joined hands to start a business in 2019.

Their resumes are roughly similar. They all graduated from Tsinghua University and Peking University, and then obtained their doctorates in the United States (with one exception) . Then they joined Google and met at Waymo. Finally, they fell in love in 2019 and started a new journey of entrepreneurship.

Soon, it received angel investment from IDG. In the driverless car field, IDG also invested in PonyAI, founded by Peng Junlou, Hodo, founded by Ni Kai, and Silicon Valley star Zoox.

So what is the name of the company founded by the four talented people of Waymo?

QCraft, the smartest way to sail a light boat .

The name is just like what it says, and what we want to do is directly related to the name: from the beginning, we clearly realized that autonomous driving is a long-distance race. If we want to win in the long-distance race and make it to the end, we need an efficient and agile team, and work with industry partners to apply autonomous vehicle technology to real life and meet the ultimate needs of users.

Technology route, China and the United States advance together

According to QINGZHOU Zhihang's disclosure, their technical solutions will cover multiple scenarios from low speed to high speed, from logistics to travel, from commercial vehicles to passenger vehicles.

The core development ideas are divided into three aspects:

First, the team : light, fast, and efficient.

They formed a core team from the world's top autonomous driving companies and technology companies such as Waymo, Tesla, Uber ATG, Ford, Nvidia, and Facebook.

In terms of organizational structure, the company has achieved full coverage of key technology modules for autonomous driving, and has deep technical accumulation and rich industry experience in the fields of perception, simulation, motion planning, sensors and vehicle systems. Thanks to its unique technical path, the team has always maintained its characteristics of being light, fast and efficient.

The second is Technical path : support rapid expansion.

Entering the autonomous driving market in 2019 is not early, but it also has the advantages of being a latecomer.

Different from the traditional technical path, Qingzhou Zhihang's approach is to use large-scale intelligent simulation systems and self-learning decision-making and planning frameworks to significantly reduce testing costs, improve development efficiency, and ensure the scalability of solutions.

In addition, for various boundary problems of unmanned vehicles, the traditional approach is to discover and solve them through the collection of a large amount of real road test data and repeated manual adjustment of algorithm parameters. However, data collection in real scenes requires a large number of vehicles and time, and solving or optimizing boundary problems requires a lot of manpower.

Therefore, with the help of a large-scale intelligent simulation system, QINGZHOU Zhihang can reproduce boundary scenarios in a simulation environment and generate a large amount of data simulating real scenarios based on existing data.

At the same time, the autonomous learning decision-making planning framework developed by QINGZHOU Zhihang has abandoned the traditional single planning and decision-making method. It can autonomously learn various complex scenarios in simulation scenarios, seek optimal motion planning decisions, and ensure safety and comfort.

The third is implementation : all-round and multi-scenario.

The four talented Chinese people from Waymo will naturally land across the ocean between China and the United States.

On the one hand, QCraft appears on the latest DMV list under the name of QCraft, taking advantage of Silicon Valley.

On the other hand, it has been implemented in Beijing, Shenzhen and Suzhou.

Low-key 4 talents

Finally, with the disclosure of industrial and commercial information, it is time to fully introduce the four talented people who founded Qingzhou Zhihang.

Co-founder and CEO Yu Qian .

He entered the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University in 1997, graduated with a master's degree in 2004, and received his doctorate from the University of Southern California in 2008.

He mainly specializes in computer vision and machine learning. He was the technical leader of key projects in Google Street View Group, helping Google Maps complete its transformation towards localization.

He joined Waymo in 2017 and served as the head of machine learning algorithm research and development for Waymo's key perception modules.

In January 2019, Qingzhou Zhihang was founded.

Co-founder Wang Kun , graduated from Peking University with a master's degree in 2014, Top Coder, captain of the ACM/ICPC World Finals team.

He interned at Google China in 2013 and joined Google in 2014, becoming the first person to join Waymo directly from Google China.

Wang Kun is good at simulation and is also responsible for the simulation system and system architecture at Waymo.

Co-founder Hou Cong .

He entered Tsinghua University's undergraduate program in automation in 2002 and went to Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008 to pursue a doctorate in computer science.

He joined Google after graduation in 2013 and joined Waymo in December 2016.

There is also a more low-key person named Dafang , who also graduated from Peking University and Tsinghua University, and met the other three Qingzhou founders during the Waymo period.

Of course, this is not all there is to this emerging driverless car company.

I don’t know what Qingzhou Zhihang’s driving skills are like?

In addition, if you are interested in them, you can also add the QuantumBit Assistant WeChat account:

qbitbot11 , note "unmanned vehicle".

Raise your curiosity and questions and participate in the unmanned vehicle cloud test ride + simulation system live broadcast next Saturday

If there are many curious people, we can also further invite Uncle Yu to talk about it - crosstalk , oh, about driverless cars.

Well, that's it~