Author: Fan Xinru Source: IT Times
On January 15th, the Westwell Media Communication Conference of Westwell Technology was held in Shanghai. At the communication meeting, Tan Limin, founder and CEO of Xijing Technology, officially announced that the world's first intelligent power-changing driverless commercial vehicle Q-Truck has achieved mass production.
As a technology company with driverless commercial vehicles as the track, since 2016, Nishii has set its sights on a special scenario - the port, the development of autonomous commercial vehicles in the port. At the end of 2016, Nishii established an unmanned vehicle team. In January 2018, Nishii released the world's first unmanned collection card based on diesel modification in Zhuhai Port. In September 2018, Nishii took the lead in launching a new driverless species, the world's first full-time driverless commercial vehicle Q-Truck, reinterpreting the full-time driverless heavy truck, and achieving mass production in 2020.
Tan Limin said that the Q-Truck team has now landed in Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and other countries. Since 2020, Nishii Technology has joined hands with Hutchison Ports to complete the world's first unmanned port truck collection project delivered to users in Thailand. In 2021, the Q-Truck fleet entered COSCO SHIPPING's Abu Dhabi Khalifa Port Phase II Terminal, pioneering the global "driverless commercial operation" model, helping the terminal to become the first port in the Middle East to deploy driverless vehicles. In the same year, Q-truck also achieved the goal of operating in extremely cold conditions at the Xinjiang International Dry Port in mainland China, becoming the first unmanned driving benchmark along the China-Europe express train. At present, the number of unmanned vehicles actually operated by Nishii Technology in the world has approached 100 units.
In addition to the Q-Truck series, at the press conference on the same day, Qomolo One, the world's first cross-scenario unmanned heavy-duty mobile platform launched by Nishii, was also unveiled. According to reports, Qomolo One breaks the limitations of a single application scenario and implements a platform with multiple uses. The Qomolo One continues Q-Truck's philosophy of "removing the cab" with a modular design that can be combined freely like "Lego", enhancing the interchangeability and scalability of the vehicle. In the actual demonstration, in just 6 minutes, the Qomolo One modules can be combined into a driverless bus with a total length of 14 meters.
Compared with Q-Truck, Qomolo One is more like an all-encompassing driverless platform car, in addition to having a strong cargo capacity, it also creates an open ecology, and users can customize modules according to their own needs to flexibly respond to multiple application scenarios. Tan Limin said that in the future, Qomolo One can be applied to unmanned operation scenarios under special needs such as special fire protection, ore transportation, and mobile offices.
The Qomolo series of driverless commercial vehicles adopts a new generation of converged perception architecture, equipped with self-developed ultra-long-range high-precision industrial-grade binocular cameras, lidar, millimeter wave radar and other combination sensors, which can help vehicles perceive the surrounding working conditions in a 360-degree way. Relying on the self-developed deep learning engine and edge computing platform, ultra-high-speed intelligent path planning operation and ultra-visual distance V2X intelligent collaboration system give Qomolo the ability to work unmanned with extreme precision and make the operation process more flexible. The centimeter-level precision fusion positioning system can help vehicles to accurately stop in business scenarios, so as to realize unmanned intelligent power exchange, autonomous loading and unloading, etc.
In the future, Xijing will also carry out more exploration of double-carbon ecology in the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. From 2021 onwards, Nishii Technology, GCL Energy and Quchain Technology will explore the commercial connection between intelligent driving and blockchain and new energy. At the same time, it also jointly explores solid-state batteries with Qingtao Development to achieve the first commercial landing of unmanned commercial vehicles.