Most bus lines are at a loss, and increasing additional revenue is also one of the pain points.
Interviewed company: Shenlan Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.
Respondent: Zhao Xu, Vice President of Technology, Shenlan
In the autopilot exhibition area of the WAIC 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, a self-driving smart bus with a panda appearance attracted people’s attention. This Panda Smart Bus is an artificial intelligence bus jointly developed by Shenlan Technology and Shanghai Shenlong Bus Co., Ltd. (Shenlong Bus). is currently in Guangzhou, Tianjin, Changzhou, Deyang, Zhangzhou and Chizhou. Trial operation in several cities in China.
The company continued to report on Shenlan Technology and analyzed the unmanned retail business of Shenlan Technology in detail. However, in fact, Shenlan Technology has always attached importance to basic research and development, and also focused on the development of commercial products on the market side, both software and its own production base. First of all, from the retail upgrade track, there are also layouts in other areas such as autonomous driving, intelligent robots, smart transportation, education, finance, medical care, and bio-intelligence.
In June of this year, Shenlan Technology obtained a license for the intelligent networked road test issued by Guangzhou. The license was issued 24 times. Shenlan Technology is the only bus license, 8 On the 31st, Shenlan Technology announced that the Panda Smart Bus won the first intelligent network passenger bus license in Shanghai, and it was also the first intelligent network passenger bus vehicle that was tested and passed by Shanghai V2X network test.
So why does Shenlan Technology choose to automate the bus business? What is the difference and characteristics of autopilot solutions from other companies? Why is Shenlan Technology able to do this? In the future, there must be better development and what problems need to be solved? With these questions, I interviewed Zhao Xu, the person in charge of the automatic driving business of Shenlan Technology and vice president of technology.
Zhao Xu told us that Shenlan Technology has seen several major pain points in existing bus operations:
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In a big city, people take more than 30 minutes on a single bus, and even more than 2 hours in the event of a traffic jam. Therefore, people also have entertainment and consumption needs on the bus, but at present the satisfaction of such needs is low.
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The bus environment is not comfortable enough. Buses have odors and bumps. When they are crowded, they need to worry about theft and other dangers.
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From the perspective of the operator, the bus operating company has more than 40% of the operating costs are labor costs, and the bus driver’s requirements are high, it takes at least 5 years to get the A3 driver’s license. According to the data of a certain city bus group, the average age of bus drivers is more than 50 years old, and they are willing to work as bus drivers in the future.The labor force will also decrease.
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Most of the bus lines are at a loss, and adding additional revenue is also one of the pain points.
For these characteristics, Shenlan Technology has designed a panda bus with a total length of about 12 meters, equipped with a driver’s seat (in the case of an emergency, requiring driver control), equipped with intelligent driving technology and hands-on technology of Shenlan Technology’s independent intellectual property rights. The identification system, the vehicle-mounted robot, and the functions of voice interaction, accurate advertisement push, passenger abnormal behavior monitoring, intelligent escape emergency system, etc., the unmanned technology level is between L3-L4. In the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference “AI Shining Belt and Road” theme forum, Shenlan Technology expects to increase the income of one or two thousand cars per month.
Compared with the modification schemes of many autopilot companies on the market, Shenlan Technology cooperates with Shenlong Bus to adopt the forward design of the vehicle and the highly integrated autonomous driving scheme. “We are autonomous driving system. This is one of our advantages. Of course, there are a lot of spare parts. We will choose international suppliers that are well-received in the country. The added AI value-added service products on the vehicles are also in the whole vehicle. Design should be considered, so we will also customize some parts to verify some new technologies.” Zhao Xu said.
At present, Panda Smart Bus has a mileage of more than 4,000 kilometers in the closed field test of the National Intelligent Network (Shanghai) test area, and more than 80% of the test scenes have a speed of 40 km/h (according to the current Chinese Industry regulations are the maximum design speed of buses of 69 km / h, the average speed of China’s bus scene is about 25 km / h.) In the future, Shenlan Technology is likely to push this speed to 50 or even 60 km per hour, and prepare Mass production delivery.
Before, it was also analyzed that the mine scene is one of the most suitable scenes for automatic driving. Because the mining roads are closed, each mine has a single shift on a relatively fixed route, and the speed is often lower than 30km/ h. Compared with ordinary passenger cars and taxis, there are similar characteristics for buses with fixed-route buses. However, buses need to carry people, the road conditions are more complicated and faster, and the safety and accuracy requirements of vehicles are required. higher. This scene is more complicated than the mine scene, and the difficulty of landing is also moreBig.
It is also for these reasons that the existing auto-driving buses that have entered the testing phase in China have chosen relatively closed and relatively small-scale parks for testing. For example, the Panda Smart Bus of Shenlan Technology has been tested and commissioned in Tianjin Zhongxin Eco-city and Bio-Island in Guangzhou. The Yutong L4-class self-driving bus “Xiaoyu” was successfully commissioned on the open road of Zhengzhou Smart Island. It is reported that its main “car-road-cloud-net-method” five in one The 5G intelligent bus system solution has accumulated a safe driving test distance of 10,000 kilometers.
The “Xiaoyu” bus is also very different from the “Panda” bus, 小宇 The bus can provide 8 seats per car. There is no driver’s seat. When the bus is fully charged, it can travel 200 kilometers under the condition of air conditioning. The test route of Zhengzhou Smart Island Bus is 1.53 kilometers, clockwise ring in the core area of the island. It operates in a public transport mode and operates at 3 stations (average station distance 508 meters), with a total of 4 buses.
The Panda Bus of Shenlan Technology has 23 seats, 79 passengers, and a driver’s seat (safety seat). The test circuit in Shanghai is arranged in the open test roads in Lingang and Jiading District. Still in the process of communicating with the competent authorities.
Volvo launched a total length of 12 meters with the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 2019. Can accommodate up to 80 passengersThe passenger’s full-size autonomous electric bus has also entered the testing phase.
At present, there are no auto-driving buses that can be driven on daily roads. The main reason is that the current autonomous driving technology is not yet fully mature. The cost has not been reduced to the level that can be commercialized. In addition, existing road regulations have not yet developed a corresponding plan for autonomous driving. In addition to the possibility of accidents caused by delays in decision control or perceived errors during driving, the safety of the vehicle in a fully connected state is also debatable. The Volvo bus mentioned above combines artificial intelligence systems with network security and firewall measures to protect against potential attacks.
On the other hand, autonomous driving, as a cutting-edge technology in the field of transportation, has also received the attention of local governments. In April 2018, the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Public Security jointly issued the “Intelligent Network Connection.” The Trial Measures for Vehicle Road Test Management Regulations regulates the regulation of autonomous driving road tests at the national level. In July of the same year, , the Ministry of Transport also issued the “Technical Guide for the Construction of Automated Driving Closed Test Sites (Provisional)” to guide locals to guide the construction of closed field testing. The next step will be to promote guidance on the development of autonomous driving at the national level to promote the development of autonomous driving technology.
At present, in many cities in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, etc., road surveys have been opened, and there are more places to open closed test sites. In April this year,Beijing released its first autopilot report, “Beijing Autopilot Vehicle Road Test Report (2018)”. According to the data, in 2018, Beijing has issued temporary road test licenses for 56 self-driving vehicles of 8 enterprises. The road test of self-driving vehicles has safely traveled more than 153,600 kilometers. By 2022, Beijing Intelligent Network’s vehicle test open road mileage reached 2,000 kilometers.
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