ABOUT US

Who we are

The world’s first affordable, safe, and reliable autonomous vehicle ready to ignite the transportation revolution. Ready for immediate deployment, DragonFly Car is uniquely equipped to start to make the transportation revolution a reality globally by cutting emissions, reducing accidents, and creating more efficient transportation economics around the world. The large-scale adoption of autonomous driving vehicles has several barriers such as reliability, ethical and legal considerations, and affordability. To address these issues, we have developed an affordable autonomous vehicle equipped for low-speed scenarios such as university campuses, industrial parks, and areas with limited traffic. Our approach starts with low-speed to ensure safety, thus allowing immediate deployment. We believe this is the right price point for universal adoption of autonomous vehicles.

Why we are here

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by robots.

I was a robotics hobbyist for years growing up but it was Bill Gates’ “A Robot in Every Home” article published in The Scientific American that marked a personal turning point for me. It was then, as a grad student, that I decided to dedicate my career to the robotics field.

In his article, Bill Gates brought to life a future where robotics would be as ubiquitous as the personal computer and provided a rationale for why the robotics industry is now on the same explosive growth trajectory that the computer industry was 30 years ago.

Ten years after Bill Gates wrote his seminal article in February of 2018, I’ve come to believe that the Age of Robotization is here.

From silicon microprocessors and the first personal computer, to Google and Facebook and finally, to internet commerce services such as Airbnb and Uber, each ‘new layer’ of technology in our lives connected us closer together. Today, for the most part, we have become used to humans providing services over the internet but I believe that a new layer of technology -- services provided by robots instead of humans -- is coming soon and it will radically change our lives for the better.

But that transition has to be carefully done. At PerceptIn, my vision hasn’t been just to create a great technology company that could make robotization ubiquitous in the form of autonomous vehicles or robots, but to create a better way for us to live, work and spend time with those closest to us.

Similar to how the personal computer opened us up to vast amount of knowledge, connections with others around the world and a more flexible way of working, I believe that the autonomous vehicles and robots will enable new and better ways of organizing our lives, our cities and our labor force.

Take transportation as an example. There is a true cost to the way we travel today. Our goal at PerceptIn — especially with the launch of the DragonFly (‘the people’s autonomous vehicle”) — is to enable citizens to take back time for leisure, creativity and productivity in an increasingly demanding global information economy. According to the The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Americans spend a total of 30 billion hours per year on driving, sitting in traffic or looking for a parking space.

There is also a true opportunity cost to driving, parking and insurance beyond increased time savings and enablement of upward economic mobility. A McKinsey report states that from 2015 to 2030, the benefits of AVs could add between $3 billion and $4 billion, or $2,200 to $2,800 per resident. Nearly four-fifths of these benefits will result from improvements in safety.

Finally, AVs can offer freedom and independence to people who cannot drive cars: the very old, the very young and the disabled and enable more diverse participation in our social and cultural networks.

After holding numerous engineering and research roles at major companies such as Intel, Microsoft and LinkedIn, I worked on autonomous driving technologies at Baidu U.S.A., where I led a team to develop AI algorithms and integrate different sensors into Baidu’s autonomous driving system. While I gained valuable experience there, I had a more expansive vision for what I wanted to achieve: a world that truly embraced robot and autonomous vehicle technologies.

But to achieve this at a practical level and scale the benefits of autonomous driving to all citizens and not just to the privileged few, I knew that we really needed to drive down the cost of autonomous vehicles. I also felt that we needed to provide citizens not just with a product, the autonomous car, but the education and training necessary to create their own autonomous vehicles.

To take this new approach and truly follow my vision to create ‘the people’s autonomous vehicle’, I left Baidu to start my own company, PerceptIn.

Our most recent manifestation of our vision at PerceptIn is the DragonFly, an autonomous vehicle aimed at democratizing autonomous driving technology globally. The DragonFly is different from other autonomous vehicles being tested in the market because it is built with a vision-based, multi-sensor and fusion-based system that utilizes a combination of computer vision technologies. Whereas other autonomous vehicles typically cost around half a million to build, the DragonFly enables safe, reliable and low-speed autonomous driving and is available for $40,000 USD. When we reach scale — or sell approximately 500 units — the cost of the Dragonfly goes down to $10,000 per unit.

Our team sees the coming of the transportation revolution and the risks of it emulating the digital divide where some benefit and others are excluded. We feel that we are at a unique conjecture of our history where we -- as individual citizens -- can shape how the pending transportation revolution plays out. Our objective at PerceptIn is to create a future where we can enable people to thrive in a new labor force instead of displace the jobs that are so important to us as citizens.

My team and I are deeply committed to this mission and have published a textbook to teach people how to develop autonomous vehicles. People often say that building an autonomous vehicle is just as difficult and far-fetched as building a rocket but we disagree. In fact, we’ve simplified the whole process in our textbook and will soon be publishing how-to articles. In essence, building autonomous vehicles is not that much different from building legos — at PerceptIn, we have simplified AV designs and modularized the components, such that developers can simply integrate these five or six components to build their own autonomous vehicles.

We are also developing courses on autonomous vehicles through our IEEE community and are offering researchers and practitioners in both online forums and in person conferences to exchange ideas on how to develop AVs. And that’s just the start of our mission to educate and train individuals to create their own autonomous vehicles and truly participate in the transportation revolution.

At PerceptIn, we stand behind our commitment to democratize robotics for the betterment of humanity and we hope that you will be able join us in our vision to make the pending transportation revolution beneficial for citizens all over the world. Creation, not mere consumption, is the approach we need to ensure that we as humans — with all of our creative energy, brilliance and capacity to care for others — are in the driver’s seat of the coming Age of Robotization.

Sincerely,

Dr. Shaoshan Liu, Founder and Chairman of PerceptIn