China's Baidu corporation has signed a strategic cooperation agreement to work on commercial driverless vehicles.

The cooperation is expected to realize small-scale mass production of commercial-use unmanned vehicles by the end of July in 2018, with the production of the first domestic self-driving bus, China Daily reported.

The plan involves putting self-driving buses into trial operation next year, and bringing forward domestic mass production of self-driving vehicles in the next two years.

Zhongguancun-based Baidu's new project – Apollo – aims to open up the company's autonomous driving platform to its partners, so as to further develop self-driving technology.

It is planned that by 2030 China will bring the theory, technologies and application of artificial intelligence to the advanced world level to become the world's main innovation center for Artificial Intelligence. At present China is the second on publication of international scientific and technical documents and on the number of patents for inventions in this field.