Baidu opens the Apollo code
On 4 July 2017 Baidu put Apollo 1.0 on GitHub, the open code of a platform for autonomous driving. The first version did one thing: replay the route and speed a human driver had driven, in an enclosed venue, by GPS. It could not perceive obstacles close by and did not drive on public roads. Baidu had promised to open the code on 18 April.
Why it matters
A carmaker or a start-up could take a ready driving stack with reference hardware and build on it instead of starting from nothing. The April release stressed that the large players had until then kept their systems closed. On the day it was read, 24 September 2026, the repository had 9,954 forks.
The April release promised code for obstacle perception, trajectory planning, vehicle control and the vehicle operating system with testing tools, and a plan: enclosed environments in July, simple urban roads by the end of the year, highways and open streets by 2020. The release is dated 18 April at 21:15 New York time, that is the morning of the 19th in Beijing. On 5 July, at Baidu Create, its first developer conference, the company announced that more than 50 partners had joined the project - from Chery, FAW and Great Wall to Bosch, Continental, NVIDIA and TomTom - and that AutonomouStuff had converted two cars in three days with the Apollo 1.0 code and shown them on a short track near the venue. In its annual report for 2017, filed on 15 March 2018, Baidu speaks of over 90 partners. Both figures are the company's own. What the record does not claim: that the code had been handed over in April, as the research report behind the candidate said - then it was a promise.