Stimulated by factors such as the special needs of the epidemic, low-speed autonomous vehicles have accelerated their landing as "AI couriers". Before the ultimate goal of "fully unmanned driving", which is automatic driving, matures and lands, unmanned delivery vehicles have undoubtedly become an important landing and monetization path for autonomous driving technology. Recently, unmanned delivery vehicles have also accelerated the application process through price exploration.
At the same time, Zhixing completed hundreds of millions of yuan of A+ round financing, Lingjun Technology completed tens of millions of yuan Pre-A round of financing, and Xiaoma Zhixing completed the D round of financing... The domestic automatic driving industry has recently frequently raised financing, with the continuous influx of funds, the research and development of various enterprises has accelerated, and the application scenarios of autonomous driving technologies such as assisted driving, unmanned logistics vehicles, and unmanned mine vehicles have landed one after another, and the competition in the automatic driving industry in 2022 is entering a new stage of both spelling technology and application landing.
Unmanned logistics vehicles are "lightly loaded" on the road
On the eve of the Spring Festival of the Year of the Tiger in 2022, on the streets of Shunyi in Beijing, a "little tiger" with cartoon shape and AI technology core sent new year goods to the residents of Shunyi. This "little tiger" of automatic delivery is the "little devil camel" of the unmanned delivery vehicle.
When I bought fresh food and snacks at the supermarket and received a text message notification to pick up the goods, I found that the "courier" was an autonomous delivery vehicle. Such a scene is no longer unusual for the citizens living and working in Yizhuang and Shunyi in Beijing. With the changes in the epidemic situation in many parts of the country, many batches of automatic delivery vehicles have also been installed in communities and distribution points in Shanghai and other places, reducing the pressure for community volunteers, couriers and other staff.
Taking the epidemic prevention and control in the past two years as an opportunity, unmanned delivery vehicles have accelerated their landing. In Beijing alone, Shunyi, Yizhuang, Haidian and other areas, there are Jingdong, Mimu Zhixing, Neolithic, White Rhino and other enterprises of autonomous driving terminal logistics vehicles have been put on the job. Taking Wumart as an example, at the end of this year, all Wumart stores in Shunyi will use the terminal logistics automatic delivery vehicle Xiao Devil Camel 2.0.
In recent years, with the rapid growth of e-commerce, same-city services and other formats, the logistics industry is facing many problems at the terminal distribution level: such as express delivery, catering, fresh food, medicine and other delivery items, communities, business districts, office areas and other distribution scenarios are complex, and the mobility of distribution personnel is large and it is difficult to hire. In April 2021, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security released the "most shortage" industry ranking in the first quarter of that year, and the courier ranked eighth among the 100 occupations on the list.
"The automatic distribution of terminal logistics is on the eve of the outbreak, and the head customers have begun to deploy on a large scale of the scene." Zhang Kai, chairman of The Wisdom Bank, said. In order to meet the rapid growth of order demand for terminal logistics automatic delivery vehicles, the terminal logistics automatic delivery vehicle factory located in Baoding has been fully upgraded, covering an area of 10,000 square meters, which can achieve the production capacity target of 10,000 terminal logistics automatic delivery vehicles per year, and become the world's largest flexible manufacturing base for terminal logistics automatic distribution vehicles.
With the acceleration of batch landing, the cost of automatic delivery vehicles has also accelerated. On April 19, The Company released the 2.0 Little Magic Camel, which cost 128,800 yuan per bicycle, becoming China's first 100,000 yuan terminal logistics automatic delivery vehicle, which is expected to be put on the market in May 2022.
"In Beijing, the labor cost of a courier is about 100,000 yuan to 120,000 yuan a year, and while the stability is improved and the cost is reduced through technical means, the pricing of 128,800 yuan is also considered from the business logic, and the unmanned logistics vehicle must be 'equal to manpower'." Gu Weihao, CEO of Zhixing, said.
The "AI old driver" is still improving
Compared with unmanned logistics vehicles carrying goods, volkswagens and the industry still have "higher and stronger" expectations for technical capabilities such as safety before they are fully on the road for autonomous passenger cars carrying people.
On April 19, Mo Mo announced the upgrade of its autonomous driving data intelligence system MANA, and at present, MANA has completed nearly 200,000 hours of learning time, and the virtual driving age is equivalent to 20,000 years of human drivers. Over time, MANA will make the perception of the automated driving system more accurate and the cognitive decision-making more like that of humans.
For example, AI drivers have learned to watch traffic lights.
The form of traffic lights varies greatly from place to place, such as horizontal, vertical, three lights, five lights... Even traffic lights in the same area will have a variety of real-time states such as digital countdown and flashing. Gu Weihao frankly said that the most difficult thing is to judge which road and which lane a lamp specifically manages.
In the past, many autonomous driving companies can greatly reduce the problems of self-driving vehicles identifying traffic lights through the assistance of high-precision maps. What if I don't have a HIGH-definition map? In order to ensure the ability of autonomous vehicles to "stand alone", it is necessary to improve their ability to identify traffic lights and identify lanes without the assistance of high-precision maps. Gu Weihao introduced that the team created a "double-stream" perception model, which decomposes the traffic light detection into two channels, so that the traffic light recognition in the daily passenger car test is slightly dependent on the high-precision map state. In addition, its large-scale Transformer model is used for lane line recognition, which automates labeling through the two stages of "target coarse positioning" and "fine estimation of attributes", and realizes multi-sensor fusion lane line recognition on urban roads, "so that There are no lane lines in China that cannot be recognized".
However, the relevant person in charge of the end of the year revealed that the response ability of driverless cars in some extreme scenarios still needs to continue to improve, such as dealing with the congestion at a close distance of the limit, dealing with small obstacles such as suddenly sprang out of the kitten.
In order to make up for the shortcomings of vehicle perception, enterprises in the industry such as Baidu proposed that in addition to bicycle intelligence, "smart cars and smart roads" should be realized through vehicle-road collaboration, so as to solve the scene problems such as "ghost probes" and sudden intrusion of unknown obstacles faced by unmanned vehicles.
Technological and policy breakthroughs to be "burned"
In addition to technical strength and technical route, at this stage, capital is also paying considerable attention to the progress of commercialization and mass production in the autonomous driving industry.
For the general public, in addition to taking self-driving taxis in some pilot areas and taking express deliveries from unmanned delivery vehicles, their most direct contact with autonomous driving technology may be to buy a car equipped with an assisted driving system. The reporter learned that this year, a number of cars equipped with domestic urban pilot auxiliary driving systems will soon be launched.
In commercial segments such as assisted driving and logistics, the autonomous driving industry has begun to see "return money" while investing heavily in "burning money".
However, whether it is L4 level automatic driving or low-speed unmanned logistics vehicles, batch on the road requires a double breakthrough in technology and policy. "Taking Beijing as an example, Shunyi, Yizhuang and other areas, after advance publicity and notification, unmanned logistics vehicles can already embark on the open road, but in such a complex traffic area as the fifth ring road in Beijing, due to the density of vehicles, safety and other considerations, the government may not open the terminal unmanned logistics vehicles on the road in the short term." But we believe that a spark can ignite. Hou Jun, COO of Zhixing, said.
Not only Beijing, suzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hefei and other places are also successively introducing policies related to automatic driving, opening up pilot regional traffic scenarios, etc., to accelerate the landing of autonomous driving technology.
Image source: Mitsuru Chi Heng