DiDi Autonomous Driving said it has established DiDi Voyager Labs, a research initiative focused on multimodal large models, world models, and reinforcement learning for end-to-end autonomous driving. The company also announced a research partnership with a team led by Professor Li Shengbo at Tsinghua University.
The lab will operate under a joint framework combining dedicated operations and shared resources to integrate research and engineering. The initiative includes joint talent training and industry-driven research programs.
DiDi began building its autonomous driving research team in 2016 and spun off the unit as an independent company in 2019. The company has obtained public road testing permits in multiple Chinese cities as well as in California. [TechNode reporting]