GAC's Garcia OS: Map-free, driver-less tech sees the world 'as humans do'

China's GAC Group has showcased its latest advancements in autonomous driving technology by unveiling its Garcia OS; a map-free pure-vision intelligent driving system that uses visual recognition to functions rather than relying purely on maps, reports news portal Gasgoo.

Unlike traditional systems reliant on high-precision maps or LiDAR, Garcia OS boasts a simpler hardware setup while offering extensive coverage across diverse scenarios with its three pivotal visual recognition capabilities.

Using its camera-plus-artifical intelligence system, the program is able to understand the environment around it, recognise signs, and see quite far around itself – it's claimed to be able to perceive over 150 metres ahead, 100 metres behind, and 50 metres to each side. The carmaker claims that Garcia OS is also able to identify items like ramps, tunnels, junctions, as well as understand the functions of signs such as traffic lights, flashing lights, and other signs just as humans do.

Facilitating the decision-making process, Garcia OS employs real-time tracking, intent recognition, and trajectory prediction to anticipate the behaviour of drivers around it.

Most of these is undoubtedly powered by data, and GAC claims that the software is able to evolve through self-improvements from data captured while on the road. The company has then poured investments in the GAC Cloud Data Center and GAC Intelligent Connected Big Data Platform, alongside the ONTIME mobility service platform to drive the closed-loop iteration of autonomous driving, with data as its core catalyst.

The ONTIME ecosystem encompasses the ONTIME Data Encoder for data annotation, ONTIME MapNet for high-precision mapping, and ONTIME NexSim for intelligent driving simulation.

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