Lingjun Technology self-driving bus
In recent years, with the strong support of national policies, emerging technologies such as automatic driving have a broader space for development, from technology research and development, application landing to industry progress, all tend to be a stage of rapid development, especially commercial vehicle automatic driving.
Compared with passenger cars as a means of transportation, paying more attention to the sense of experience and more privacy, commercial vehicles are born with the attribute of means of production, which should bring economic value to society and groups, so the automatic driving of commercial vehicles pays more attention to relying on advanced technology to enhance the safety of driving, reduce the driving intensity of drivers, and liberate drivers, thereby saving operating costs and achieving real cost reduction and efficiency. Among the many landing applications of automatic driving, scenes with the characteristics of fixed running routes, low speeds and relatively controllable are regarded as one of the more ideal landing scenarios for automatic driving technology, and urban buses and regional logistics belong to them.
Cities of any size need urban transportation, especially under the premise that the energy industry accelerates the policy of "carbon compliance, carbon peaking and carbon neutrality", and the government encourages people to travel green in public transportation. Coupled with the aging of the urban population, the aging problem of the urban population is also becoming more prominent, the labor force caused by the decline in population is decreasing year by year, and the purpose of the intelligent industry is to replace the repetitive work of some people, and automatic driving will also replace the role of some drivers, making the driving process safer. From another point of view, public transport is a labor-intensive industry, labor intensity, serious loss of personnel, increasing labor costs, bus operating enterprises have potential demand, if you can achieve less human or even unmanned driving, for the operator has significant practical value, so the market demand for automatic driving technology is also maintaining a growing trend. According to the different specifications of the bus will produce different uses, small buses can be applied to parks, universities, parks and other relatively closed environments; intelligent network buses are driving on urban open roads, undertaking a part of the capacity of urban public transportation and alleviating the pressure of urban public transportation.
Regional logistics is highly similar to the operation mode and scenario of city buses. Urban logistics is divided into three segments: the first is trunk logistics, that is, trucks transport between cities on the highway, the second is regional logistics, from the distribution center to the express station, and the third section is the so-called "last kilometer". The location of express delivery stations in regional logistics and the transportation routes between them are basically fixed, from this point of view, in the case of technology and data communication, it is feasible for enterprises to commercialize in these two scenarios at the same time.
In China, whether it is passenger cars or commercial vehicles of automatic driving, there are a certain degree of landing applications, for this is optimistic and known as the promotion of the next revolution in the automotive industry of the new industry, there is research on automatic driving will also be from "whether it can be achieved" to "whether it is achieved or not", in the continuous research and development and technology iteration, the policy and environment are getting more and more perfect, the vehicle is becoming more and more "smart", the sense of experience and comfort have also been improved. According to statistics, the annual market of autonomous buses exceeds 300 billion, the annual market of autonomous urban logistics exceeds 500 billion, in the future, more cars with autonomous driving functions will bring us greater surprises, in the process of promoting the automobile industry to a larger stage, it will also inevitably drive the intelligent upgrading of related industries, bringing people an unprecedented smart travel.
In many landing applications of automatic driving, scenes with the characteristics of fixed running routes, low speeds and relatively controllable are regarded as ideal landing scenarios for automatic driving technology, and urban buses and feeder logistics belong to them. At the beginning of 2022, Dr. Yang Wenli, CEO and founder of Lingjun Technology, as a guest, was invited by CCTV's "Explore Traffic" program group to record a column with the theme of "Demonstration Application and Development Thinking of Autonomous Driving Commercial Vehicles", sharing the excellent results of Lingjun Technology in unmanned bus and regional logistics segments, and discussing how to accelerate and popularize the commercial application of autonomous driving technology.
Exploring Transportation: Is Lingjun Technology's autonomous driving technology based on passenger cars more or more commercial vehicles?
Dr. Yang Wenli: The mission of Lingjun Technology is to "lead the road of intelligent driving in the future", since its inception, the company has been focusing on the core technology of automatic driving that is common on open roads, and the high-level, all-scenario application of the best technology carrier is passenger car automatic driving. The first five years of work have focused on the R&D level, and from 2021 onwards, the company will officially try to commercialize, and our goal will also be transformed from technology to product. The reason why we chose to commercially land in the scenarios of autonomous buses and urban regional logistics, we have considered several aspects: from a commercial point of view, technology ultimately produces social value and economic value; in addition, from a technical point of view, the product needs to be copied in batches, and we believe that both the commercial field of autonomous driving and the technology itself need to return to these two essences.
Exploring transportation: Lingjun Technology's current commercial layout is mainly based on autonomous buses and urban feeder logistics, right?
Dr. Wenli Yang: Yes.
Exploring Transportation: Can We Understand Urban Feeder Logistics as a Logistics Distribution Model?
Dr. Yang Wenli: Urban logistics is divided into three sections: the first section is trunk logistics, that is, trucks transport between cities on the highway, the second section is from the distribution center to the express station, and the third section is the so-called "last kilometer", which needs to be distributed.
The core technology of Lingjun Technology
Exploring transportation: If you say that in recent years, technological innovation in transportation, automatic driving is definitely worth mentioning, want to know what technological innovations Lingjun Technology has in this regard?
Dr. Yang Wenli: The core technology of Lingjun Technology has two highlights: First, the autonomous driving technology of Lingjun Technology is a positive design based on the brain of automatic driving decision-making planning. What is forward design? To take a simple example: the primary task of autonomous driving is how to learn how to drive a vehicle, and human driving is driven by the brain first directing the eyes to observe the environment, and then directing the hands and feet to control the vehicle. Our forward design is to start from the "brain", this "brain" is the core algorithm of automatic driving, and then push back to the perception system, that is, the automatic driving "eyes", and then by the "brain" to command the control system, that is, the "hands and feet" of automatic driving, and finally by the path planning algorithm to achieve the purpose of controlling the vehicle.
Autonomous vehicles are loaded with many sensors, similar to the eyes of human drivers, to perceive the surrounding traffic environment, "Where is the road?" What's on the road? What should I do? "It is the first problem to be considered for driving, so the perception system will be loaded with a variety of radar, such as lidar, millimeter wave radar, cameras, visual sensors and other sensing devices, but how far these sensors are going to "see", we can't predict before we complete the entire system, and we need the "brain" of the automatic driving system to tell the sensors of the vehicle, or when the system is designed, according to how far the data is needed to decide the path, what kind of sensors to arrange. Because passenger cars will run on highways in addition to urban roads, the faster the speed means that the farer the radar detection distance, and the sensors deployed in the first and second generation of autonomous driving prototypes of Lingjun Technology cover a distance of about 200 meters. In 2021, we have added two new driverless bus models, and the city bus runs much slower than the passenger car, which means that the visual distance does not need to be so far, only 40-60 meters, which greatly reduces the cost on the sensor.
Another highlight is that Lingjun Technology proposed the "systems engineering" design theory, the most important of which is how to combine multiple unreliable subsystems into a reliable integrated system. Automatic driving is the most important focus on safety issues, if you rely on separate equipment for data processing, from the actual application has a certain safety hazards, Lingjun technology automatic driving technology using an integrated multi-level architecture, this architecture provides a flexible fault handling program, when one of the sensors can not work properly, the multi-level architecture will actively "dimensionality reduction" from the automatic driving mode to the auxiliary driving state, and retain the adaptive cruise and lane keeping functions, until the manual takeover or the system returns to normal. It can be said that the "system engineering" ability of Lingjun Technology is still relatively outstanding in China.
Explore Transportation: Why Did You Want to Start This Self-Driving Company?
Dr. Yang Wenli: From the perspective of the original intention of entrepreneurship, at that time, I chose to return from the United States to return to China because I wanted to use what I had learned to empower the development of national science and technology and then serve the motherland, and it was the most direct way to set up a company to participate in the wave of intelligent cars leading the future development of China's economy; from the perspective of the current situation of the industry, as the national population entered the aging society, the problem of driver labor shortage will become more and more serious, and the loss caused by traffic safety problems to society is immeasurable. Autonomous driving is the most effective technical path to solve the labor shortage and traffic safety, and the work experience of me and several start-up partners can just see the assistance industry to solve these pain points; from the national policy point of view, domestic policies are also encouraging the "double creation" to set up a company to give the team more flexible and broader development space, to open their hands to do what they think is the right technology, to take what they think is the right route, and make it a relaxed platform for technological innovation that can be subversive; at the same time, Starting a business is a painful and joyful thing, and no engineer who likes to be challenged can refuse to participate in it.
Exploring Transportation: How does Lingjun Technology verify the correct route you say on the product?
Dr. Yang Wenli: After more than five years of positive research and development accumulation, Lingjun Technology has created a set of general automatic driving technology system, that is, AI drivers, AI drivers are similar to human drivers, drivers need to adapt and learn for a period of time before driving various vehicles, we will apply the AI drivers on passenger cars to apply dimensionality reduction to autonomous buses, and our adaptation iteration speed will be very fast in terms of autonomous bus technology. The first generation of prototype passenger cars of Lingjun Technology took about a year to reach the road test performance of the first technology echelon in China, the second generation of prototypes took only three months, and we took less than a month from getting the first bus body to the official operation on the road, and the second bus took less than two weeks, and so on.
Basic parameters of Lingjun Technology unmanned bus
Exploring Transportation: So can I understand that buses that now apply Lingjun Technology's autonomous driving technology can fully realize the autonomous driving function on urban roads?
Dr. Yang Wenli: We have two products, one is called the park unmanned bus, is a small bus, no steering wheel and throttle brake pedal, the maximum operating speed limit is 20 kilometers per hour, so its operation scene is in the park, universities, parks and other relatively closed environments; the other product is called the intelligent network bus, is a standard bus that can run in urban traffic, mainly can undertake part of the urban public transportation capacity, such as in Ganzhou, Lingjun Technology's self-driving bus has been officially opened in the Science and Technology City, and the bus operation route is connected to the public transportation of the main urban trunk lines such as airports, high-speed rail stations, and industrial parks, helping to alleviate the pressure of urban transportation in Ganzhou. In these closed sections, Lingjun Technology's self-driving minibuses can achieve completely unmanned driving, while intelligent networked buses need to drive on urban public roads with safety officers.
Exploring transportation: Will such self-driving buses consider mass production on public transportation in the future?
Dr. Yang Wenli: Now there is a new definition of mass production in the industry, called large-scale application on open roads, and Lingjun Technology believes that autonomous driving can achieve large-scale applications on open roads on buses, and this application is earlier than automatic driving passenger cars, because buses only need to maintain the running state of fixed lines, and most of the running speed is at medium and low speeds. The national guidance path for domestic autonomous driving is intelligent networking, and the optimal adapted model in the process of intelligent network infrastructure is also an autonomous bus.
Exploring transportation: Does Lingjun Technology only need to cooperate with the main engine factory in ganzhou's unmanned bus operation?
Dr. Yang Wenli: Automatic driving is definitely inseparable from the vehicle itself, the car is the core carrier of the automatic driving system, in order to achieve benign development of the company's business, we must cooperate with the car factory, Xiamen Jinlong, Dongfeng Yuexiang and other car manufacturers are relatively excellent partners. At this stage, Lingjun Technology is also maintaining cooperative relations with some car manufacturers to achieve a commercial closed loop of the "iron triangle" of the depot-technology company-scene side, and for the city bus, the scene side is the government.
Lingjun Technology autonomous passenger car
Exploring transportation: Now the public has a very open attitude towards the entire autonomous driving industry, because autonomous driving is a product of the times, and the scene side is also embracing a new era, in which autonomous driving technology can be more flexibly displayed in front of us. When I first experienced the autonomous vehicle three years ago, the ride was not comfortable, but the technology is iterating, I believe that time will change everything, so will Lingjun Technology do deep iteration and innovation on the self-driving bus? Or will the future consider switching direction to the technical iteration of passenger cars?
Dr. Yang Wenli: Comfort is the first impression that passengers can feel in the car. The speed of technology iteration in the past three years has been very fast, not only autonomous driving technology, but also vehicle chassis. At the beginning of 2018, the chassis-by-wire capability of the automotive industry was very poor, and at present, with the gradual penetration of L3-level intelligent driving, the chassis-by-wire technology has now entered a mature stage. Then for the automatic driving system, a long period of data iteration also tends to be perfect; the core technology of automatic driving is one aspect of the improvement of somatosensory, on the other hand, over the years, from the experience of technical personnel to do research and development, the biggest difficulty lies in the game with human drivers on the open road, because the driver's driving behavior is unpredictable, mood, weather, and even on-board music may affect his driving behavior, we believe that this "game" state will exist for a long time. If one day, the road surface is full of autonomous vehicles, but the automatic driving technology is very easy to achieve, and the day when autonomous driving is fully commercialized will also accelerate.
The strategic transformation of Lingjun Technology mainly refers to the choice of city buses and urban feeder logistics in the scene of technology landing, in fact, the technical level still maintains the technology stack of passenger cars on the open road. The application of high-dimensional technology stacks in urban buses and feeder logistics is actually dimensionally reduced to a simpler scenario. The technical advantages accumulated by Lingjun Technology in previous years can be directly copied in this dimensionality-reducing scenario, so as to maintain our leading position in autonomous driving technology; secondly, whether it is a bus or a regional logistics truck, the operating environment of both types of vehicles is an open road within the city, so the data accumulated in these scenarios can support the data iteration required for passenger car research and development. We call this set of technology and business closed loops "going down and going back."
Exploring Transportation: Are the operating lines of Urban Feeder Logistics also from fixed point A to point B? Or some other mode?
Dr. Yang Wenli: The reason why Lingjun Technology chose to land on regional logistics and city buses is because the modes and scenarios of the operation of these two types of vehicles are highly similar. The stations on the bus operation line are fixed, but the line of the passenger car is not fixed, it will travel from the main road of the city to the high speed, and the city branch line is the express delivery point from the distribution center to the community, and the lines and locations of these express points are also unchanged, and they are also fixed lines, so this operation mode on the fixed line is connected with our technology and data.
Exploring Transportation: At what point in time did Lingjun Technology start doing this commercialization project?
Dr. Yang Wenli: Lingjun Technology began its strategic transformation from the third quarter of 2021, first made the self-driving bus, got the chassis after the first bus modification in October, and then adapted the automatic driving technology, officially started trial operation in Ganzhou in November, and obtained mass production orders in December. The technical ability of the first echelon, the industry's first decision-making planning algorithm, the industry's highest technical achievements / capital input-output input ratio, in the case of the commercialization starting point of each player in the industry, the more the technical advantages of Lingjun Technology will be more obvious.
Exploring Transportation: What do you think are the biggest obstacles and obstacles in the process?
Dr. Yang Wenli: As one of the most senior industry participants, the biggest resistance I feel is from the deep cognitive misunderstanding of capital for autonomous driving technology and the misjudgment of the productization and business cycle of the industrial system, and the impetuous replication of the Internet development and financing model of the industry players to the low-key and pragmatic core value startups such as Lingjun Technology and the misallocation of industry resources.
Now everyone has realized that the domestic autonomous driving industry in 2014-2021 is the core supply chain maturity period, during which the core supply chain gradually matures, but during this period, more companies have done a lot of waste of ineffective costs in order to raise funds, and Lingjun Technology has chosen low-key polishing technology during this period, L4 passenger cars, simulation platforms, map tools, etc.
Exploring Transportation: If we analyze the entire business landscape, what do you think the direction of Lingjun Technology will be from the perspective of future commercialization? I wonder if you have any previous assessments?
Dr. Yang Wenli: The annual market of autonomous buses exceeds 300 billion, the annual market of autonomous urban logistics exceeds 500 billion, and the annual market of autonomous passenger cars exceeds 2.5 trillion, thanks to the fact that the technology stack of Lingjun Technology is based on the highest-level passenger cars, these three scenarios are the core areas of the current and future commercialization of Lingjun Technology. I firmly believe that Lingjun Technology will become the "crown jewel" of the autonomous driving industry.
The essential purpose of automatic driving is to train AI drivers, save human costs, and then make the entire automatic driving, especially on the autonomous bus, more stable and safer, automatic driving has no emotions, so it is superior to human drivers in terms of system safety. In terms of market size, no matter what size of the city, public transportation is needed, especially under the premise of accelerating the "carbon standard, carbon peak and carbon neutrality" policy in the energy industry, and the government encourages people to travel green in public transportation. Coupled with the aging of the urban population is also becoming more prominent, the labor force caused by the decline in population is decreasing year by year, and the purpose of the intelligent industry is to replace the repetitive work of some people, and automatic driving will also replace the role of some drivers, making the driving process safer, so the market demand for automatic driving technology is also maintaining a growing trend.
Exploring Transportation: In the new year, will the strategy and direction of Lingjun Technology have a new layout?
Dr. Yang Wenli: Commercially, we will carry out a new layout in two aspects: first, in terms of product lines, Lingjun Technology plans to continue to expand from autonomous buses to urban regional logistics, and we will carry out in-depth business in accordance with the strategic direction previously formulated; second, in terms of commercial geography, in addition to the R&D team of Beijing headquarters and the operation and testing team of Ganzhou Branch, we will also increase the operation of Suzhou, Wuhan and Changsha. In terms of research and development, we will adhere to the continuous technical iteration of L4 autonomous driving passenger cars, self-developed simulation platforms, and self-developed high-precision map tools. Capitally, unlike the low-key polishing of AI drivers in the past five years, the company will accelerate the pace of financing and strive to win the commercialization campaign of autonomous driving in 2022-2025.
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