There is a fundamental difference between technological breakthroughs and industrial landings.
As early as 2013, when Bezos shouted that "Amazon will use drone delivery", it once ignited social enthusiasm. The capital market was once optimistic about drone logistics, and a group of Silicon Valley companies participated in the technology competition in this field. At the same time, in China, SF was the first to invest in the exploration of this frontier field, and carried out an attempt at drone delivery in rural China. Since then, JD.com, Meituan, etc. have combined their own business to carry out investment and attempts.
In the past ten years, after DJI led the global UAV trend, the consumer-grade UAV explosion and then the cold, the world's most advanced laboratory gradually went outdoors and towards commercial application, the application scenarios of UAVs ushered in comprehensive and new thinking. The opportunity for To B is beginning to show.
To a large extent, carrying out low-altitude logistics is not only an opportunity for the industry, but also a strategic choice for a country. Industry insiders told Geek Park that "in the aviation field, (historically) we have been taken away by Europe and the United States", and it was DJI that let the bureau see China's opportunities in the field of drones - "At present, we do have the opportunity to lead the world in the field of drones."
01 "This thing can be done!"
In December 2013, the 60 Minutes production team won an interview with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Led by Bezos, the filming team traveled to a mysterious room in the Amazon office building.
Along the way, the conjecture about "what's in the room" was repeatedly dismissed, and Bezos jokingly said, "If you can guess what it is, I'll give you half of the property to try your luck in Las Vegas." Everyone's curiosity was raised high until they saw something in the room—an eight-rotor drone.
"Like a giant, flying tarantula," producer Mikhailovich recalled. There have been rumors about Amazon's drone logistics project Prime Air, and under the records of the "60 Minutes" team, Prime Air's drone "Bee" was first released.
In Bezos's vision, with the "bee," it takes consumers just 30 minutes from clicking the "Buy" button to receiving the package. He also boldly predicted on the show that drone deliveries would enter the market in the next four to five years.
Amazon drones in flight with goods | Source: Network
The high-profile Bezos ignited the enthusiasm of the society, and "drone delivery" dominated the US news for several weeks. In China, on the other side of the ocean, logistics pioneer SF is also doing the same exploration. In Dongguan, Guangdong Province, similar eight-rotor aircraft models carry 25KG of cargo are constantly test flights.
Among silicon Valley tech companies, a race to put drones into logistics is starting.
Just about half a year after Amazon shouted its export number, outside a farm in Australia, Google also officially disclosed that it had already launched a two-year drone logistics project Project Wing. Zipline, a drone company that delivers medical supplies, has already crossed western Rwanda to deliver vital blood products to hospitals that need additional supplies. Veteran logistics company FedEx has also begun testing, trying to integrate drone delivery with existing logistics models.
After a period of continuous exposure, many venture capital funds in the United States began to target drone logistics.
At that time, Mao, who graduated with a doctorate, was working at the Qualcomm Research Institute. His friend led a drone logistics project that Qualcomm invested in in 2014. Qualcomm's investment logic represents the market's judgment of this emerging field to a certain extent - Prime Air serves Amazon's own logistics system, and other e-commerce platforms cannot be met by Prime Air if they have the demand for drone delivery. "As long as you believe that Bezos's vision is right, even if other drone logistics projects can't compete with Prime Air, it is needed by the market."
In fact, Qualcomm is also doing drones inside. As early as 2010, Qualcomm began working with a team of Professor Vijay Kumar at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Kumar was one of the world's first scientists to study drones, and his team developed a prototype quadcopter back in 2006. By embedding Qualcomm chips on their small drones, drones can achieve some visual positioning and control.
In the early days, a group of the world's leading laboratories began to explore and study drones very early. These include kumar-led GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania (mainly attacking the trajectory excellent UAV formation), ETH Zurich (mainly engaged in motion planning, construction map), MIT Space Control Laboratory (main attack path planning), etc. But most of them did not break through the scope of the laboratory, "the first generation of drones can only run code in the laboratory." Mao recalled that the complexity of the external world far exceeded that of the simulations in the laboratory, which also meant that there were more problems that needed to be solved in real scenes.
After Qualcomm seven or eight years, Mao began to brew a business a year ago. That was when the drone market continued to be bullish, and after 2007, the field once again welcomed a large number of entrepreneurs. From 2013 to 2017, every year, when Mao and his classmates in Tsinghua's Electronic Engineering Department, Wang Xing and Wang Huiwen, the founders of Meituan, had dinner, they would ask him a question: "Can drone delivery work?"
At that time, the Meituan group, which had just exceeded one million takeaway orders, was also thinking about the possibility of drone delivery. In the face of Wang Huiwen's questions, even if it is only technical, Mao still can't give a feasible answer for a year. But what DJI is doing — translating the world's most advanced technological capabilities into the industry — has really inspired many entrepreneurs.
In the first half of 2014, Li Zexiang recruited Shen Shaojie from Kumar's laboratory to help DJI strengthen its vision technology. Since then, DJI's successive explosive products have become the focus of attention in the technology community, and consumer-grade drones have become investment hotspots. In May 2015, DJI announced a $75 million investment from Accel, followed by EHang, Xingtu Intelligent Control, Flying Leopard drone, drone product manufacturer Yuneec and other companies have also received financing.
Mao Yinian also finally chose consumer drones as the entrepreneurial direction, and in 2015, he returned to China to form the Airlango team. Recalling the "enthusiasm" of the drone industry for a while, he said that they, like many fellow entrepreneurs, made a lot of interesting attempts at that time. "Let's say you're standing here, and the drone can shoot around you in 360 degrees and automatically edit it into a 20-second film."
It was also during this time that some top laboratories began to move the experimental scenes of UAV tracking and positioning, mapping and planning paths to the outdoors. With the support of the U.S. Department of Defense, Kumar's team's drone tracked the tractor at a speed of 60 kilometers per hour on a farm in the United States, and since then, the drone has entered the woods of the unknown scene, without relying on maps, actively sensing the environment and planning paths - which means that the positioning and control of the drone, autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance have been gradually realized in technology.
So, around the Spring Festival in 2017, when another old friend had dinner, Mao Finally gave Wang Huiwen a "conclusive" answer: "I think (drone delivery) this thing can definitely be done, but it is only a question of how much investment and how long the research and development time is."
However, the confidence at that time did not last long. "It just proves that this thing works, but it doesn't prove that it can be achieved on what scale, at what frequency, and how reliable it can be." Entrepreneurs who come out of the research institute will soon find that "there is a fundamental difference between technological breakthroughs and industrial landings."
02 Why do to C not to B?
Sun Qian, a Sequoia investor who once invested in DJI, asked Mao in the early days of Mao's business, "Why don't you do ToC and don't do ToB?" This was a difficult question for Mao At the time, because technically, there seemed to be no difference between the two.
At that time, Mao did not understand Sun Qian's intention for a year - the B end is still a blue ocean, and the white-hot competition at the C end will soon usher in the dawn.
Industry leader DJI is doing ToC business, and in the eyes of those who have done engineering in Mao Yinian, "I think drones are simple, I can do it." In 2015, Airlango accepted angel investment from Zhen Fund and made some technological innovations, but compared with DJI, which has many forward-looking actions in the company, the progress is far lower than expected. "What we want to do, DJI has actually started to do internally. His last product was even 10 months, 12 months before us, and the product he came up with was amazing."
In 2016, when DJI drones were still in full swing, the entire drone industry began to chill. At CES (the world's largest consumer electronics exhibition) held in January of that year, the attention of the media was divided by several giants, especially the drone "Empty Shadow" released by Tencent.
Tencent consumer aircraft aerial photography drone air shadow | Source: Network
With the resources and advantages of large companies, Tencent not only joined forces with Zero degree and Qualcomm to pull the level of drone technology to a new high level, but also gave the drone a pricing below the market - 1999 yuan - directly "bloodbathed" the drone price market. The 1,000 yuan price reduction of the DJI Genie 3 full series also gave a fatal blow to competitors who hoped to gain an advantage in price.
The closure of the entrepreneurial window came unexpectedly. By 2018, there was basically no money in the drone market. The development since then is just like the judgment made by some people in the industry at that time: the consumer market can survive a few.
This year, Meituan officially released the unmanned delivery open platform. Out of curiosity and hope to develop Meituan into customers, Mao participated in this conference for one year.
At this conference, the Meituan unmanned delivery vehicle that delivered coffee to Wang Huiwen was the protagonist, and although the drone juxtaposed with the automatic car was still only a prototype, it was also taken to the conference by the company to discuss, showing that they were thinking about the possibility of drone delivery. According to Geek Park, as early as October 2016, Meituan set up a W project team to be responsible for the robot business, but these businesses have been kept secret for a long time. A few years later, the autonomous vehicle and drone businesses became separate divisions.
Meituan decided to build its own delivery team in April 2015. In hindsight, this was a forward-looking choice, and according to insiders, "quickly delivering hot takeaways to users' desks and achieving stable and efficient fulfillment is the only way for takeaway platforms to retain millions of orders." "Fast" rewrites the user's mind. But in order to maintain "fast", it seems that self-built distribution alone is not enough.
The above insider said that the distribution gap is widening year after year.
"We have hired all the people in first-tier and second-tier cities who are willing to come and deliver food, but the annual order growth is not only 15% or 20%, but may also be 5% to 10%. Our orders in first-tier and second-tier cities may be tens of millions a day, and the current gap will be several million every day."
"For the optimization of human riders, with the help of information tools, it has been done to the extreme, and there is no way for the restaurant to cooperate with you to achieve accurate coordination in seconds", at this time, "this gap must be filled through automated technology."
After a few years of entrepreneurship, Mao reflected on how simple he had imagined the landing of technology at the beginning. "Lack of thinking about business logic," he said, "the industry chain, the scene, the brand are all crucial." After the Meituan press conference, he remembered that he still had a document that recorded many of the directions he had chosen before starting a business, including logistics, but this was crossed out at the time - because he did not think clearly about how logistics actually cut in.
Meituan's drone delivery idea provides him with a way to cut in. At that time, the consumer drone was facing a heavy blow, in order to find a way out for the team, Mao took the initiative to talk to Wang Huiwen about the acquisition. In that year, Meituan completed the acquisition of Airlango, and Mao led a team to join Meituan in a year, responsible for self-research from drones and automated airports to dispatch systems and core components.
03 Rural or urban?
In China, a number of pioneers in UAV logistics, such as JD.com, SF, Xun ant, and Cainiao, initially chose to carry out UAV logistics business in rural areas.
Compared with densely populated and complex cities, the flight, take-off and landing environment in rural areas is relatively simple, and the requirements for technology and safety are correspondingly lower. On this basis, the policy review and approval of rural scenes are also relatively open, and it is easier to apply for pilot projects.
Suqian is now the dispatch center for JD.com's national drone operations. Under the influence of the hilly terrain of the Yangtze River Delta, the delivery workers here often need to cross mountains and rivers to reach the village, even if the straight-line distance from the distribution station to the village is only within 10 kilometers, sometimes it takes half a day. Such a scenario provides an opportunity for the bulk delivery of drones. In early 2016, JD.com first launched a drone delivery experiment here.
Delivery routes run between the distribution station and the village's fixed receiving point. The weight of the drone is 5 to 30 kg, according to the volume and weight of the cargo, generally a single sorty will deliver 5 to 6 single goods, and can reach more than a dozen orders. The drone automatically returns after dropping the goods at the receiving point 30 cm from the ground, and then the person at the receiving point is responsible for distributing the received goods to the user. Because the fixed route is surveyed in advance, the drone can fly at speeds of up to 100 kilometers per hour.
The first cooperation point of Jingdong UAV, Suqian Caoji Township Dry Gate, | Source: Network
Although drone delivery has brought about a significant increase in delivery efficiency, in order to match the overall operating costs, the requirements for the value of goods will also be relatively high. According to industry insiders, JD.com once asked the drone delivery business to calculate the output value. Therefore, if you pursue a more "good-looking" number, you need drones to run more times a day, or load more orders per trip.
SF's thinking is similar, they in the early years in the Liangshan area of Sichuan province from the mountain down the matsutake mushrooms, the customer is said to be from Japan. Prior to this, matsutake mushrooms needed to be manually carried down from the top of the mountain, and then crossed the layers of middlemen, and the replacement of the distribution process by drones created a very high output value.
However, the matsutake harvest season is not very long, usually starting around August and lasting from one to a half months. According to industry insiders, after the matsutake picking at the end of 19 years, SF's drone delivery business to send matsutake mushrooms washed out a batch of people, until the following August picking season came, and then recruited a new wave of people.
This kind of "single high value" idea relies on creating a business scenario that gathers high-value items and can be reused for many years. Only by ensuring stable demand all year round can we reduce system costs. "A single high value, a bit like nothing to build a double eleven", an industry insider commented, the demand for the peak can amortize the cost, "when the trough is done?" (Distribution system) you can't use it."
Many companies are also aware of the limitations of the rural scene and have begun to consciously "go to the city".
Founded in 2015, Xunant also chose the rural scene at first, and after developing the first generation of logistics drone TR7, they began to cooperate with the postal service to distribute parcels in the countryside. At the end of 2018, Xunant tried to do catering delivery for KFC, trying to use it as a springboard to test the various technologies and operational capabilities required for logistics drones in urban high-density distribution scenarios.
Compared with these companies, Meituan, which has the advantage of being a latecomer, has chosen to challenge the urban scene from the beginning. According to insiders, the logic of the US group is to build infrastructure by taking advantage of high-frequency demand. Once the infrastructure is set up, the city's emergency response to these low-frequency and occasional events can also be solved with this facility. It just so happens that the high-frequency demand of Meituan takeaway provides a unique business scenario.
In the first week of 2019, within the Meituan, a meeting was held from 9 a.m. to the early morning of the next day, and the participants were the Meituan drone team that Mao joined in a year, and they set a three-year goal: by the end of 2021, 50 drones would be operated normally, and 500 orders would be delivered daily. The first city to start the experiment is Shenzhen, which has the most complex urban scene in China.
04 Shenzhen, gradually out of a road
"In the tall CBD in Shenzhen, a large number of steel structure buildings and glass curtain walls will obscure the signal to interfere with radar reflections, and there will be a very serious canyon effect in the city, and there will be various turbulences," Chen Tianjian, head of digitalization at Meituan Cloud, told us. In addition to the cluster of buildings, there are also large green gardens in the city, dense communities, schools, and urban villages, which are very rich in terrain.
This is a major feature that distinguishes Chinese urban scenes from foreign countries, and it also derives many technical difficulties. For example, in the sparsely populated environment abroad, GPS and two cameras can meet the basic needs of UAV perception, but the domestic complex urban environment is easy to cause signal loss, once the UAV loses the signal, the positioning accuracy will decline, it is likely that there will be accidents, which requires increasing redundancy at the same time, improve the perception ability of the UAV.
In terms of climate, Shenzhen is also a typical city in the south, often encountering thunderstorms and strong winds. Google Wing's drones use fixed wings that can take off and land vertically, which is relatively poor in wind resistance and is likely to be overturned in windy weather. Meituan did not blindly copy, after considering the domestic weather, it adopted a multi-rotor model that was less affected by wind.
Meituan delivery drone | Source: Geek Park
It is understood that meituan's assumption is that if it can run through the most complex city of Shenzhen, the technical problems faced by UAVs such as positioning, navigation, and obstacle avoidance can be solved, and "basically southern cities should be able to cope."
However, as Jingdong UAV project leader Air Bahang once said in an interview, logistics drones still have many difficulties in terms of technology, policies and costs, making it still face the problem of "difficulty in entering the city".
Yang Junwei joined Meituan three years ago as the head of the UAV public affairs team, and his daily work includes coordinating airspace and route operation resources with the Air Force and civil aviation, planning low-altitude operation rules, and dealing with and responding to operational safety concerns of functional departments such as public security and urban management at the two levels of urban areas.
For Yang Junwei's team, the biggest challenge of the work is the lack of understanding of the communication object. If you want to label the style of the city, Yang Junwei said, "Shenzhen will be young people."
Shenzhen is the place where DJI started, the southern port city, accompanied by the development and maturity of consumer drones, but also pushed back the local government to introduce some airspace loose management policies. As early as 2019, Shenzhen began to carve out some test flight areas, allowing drones to fly at low altitudes below 120 meters. So far, the airspace area of Shenzhen UAVs has accounted for 65%.
"I've seen some leaders transfer from the mainland to Shenzhen, and they were very conservative at first, but after a while, the young people of the city will influence him and make him different when making decisions, which I have personally experienced." Yang Junwei said.
In addition, in his view, the development of the drone industry, to a large extent, to carry out low-altitude logistics is not only an opportunity for the industry, but also a strategic choice of a country.
"In the aviation field, (historically) we have been taken away by Europe and the United States", it is DJI that allows the bureau to see China's opportunities in the field of drones - "At present, we do have the opportunity to lead the world in the field of drones."
In 2019, the mainland issued a number of favorable policies on UAV logistics and distribution, and by 2020, local governments have launched many innovative pilots based on UAV pilot zones, and Shenzhen is also preparing to apply for the second batch of listings.
In terms of policy communication, the biggest difficulty facing drone logistics is safety. How to prevent accidents and ensure safe flights is a top priority. According to Geek Park, in order to make the "air traffic" when the drone is running safer, Meituan designed the "space-time capsule" for the operation of the drone, and used it to plan the absolute position of the drone in time and space. When multiple drones in the same area are running at the same time, Meituan can plan and control the "capsules" without contacting each other, efficiently use spatio-temporal resources and reduce the risk of air operation.
In addition to advance route planning, real-time monitoring and scheduling are also required during the delivery of drones. To this end, meituan has built a multi-party information collaborative decision-making system known as the "symphony orchestra", which collects sensor data on aircraft operation, environmental information, airports, ground personnel and other data for real-time interaction and collaborative decision-making.
Meituan's UAV business has a special safety committee, and its composition includes the responsible persons of each business line - from sops on the ground, aircraft quality inspection, to design, production, operation and maintenance... Every step of the way from before to after needs to be monitored to minimize risk at the system process level.
The first meaning of communication with the outside world is "honesty", "once the trust is exhausted, it is difficult for you to do the work".
In terms of emergency management, at present, in Shenzhen, Meituan and other enterprises are also trying to explore the model of multi-party joint emergency drills. During the emergency drill, the officials and leaders of the governments and streets of the relevant parties will attend, and the enterprise will conduct a desktop or on-the-spot deduction, from the degree of intervention of all parties, the division of powers and responsibilities, to the emergency procedures, the contact information of the person in charge, and rehearse one by one, so that all relevant people can "know in their hearts".
A person in charge of a company that has provided technical support for drone logistics companies told Geek Park that drone logistics is still very resistant in terms of policy, and from the perspective of realization, it is still very far from people's lives. But Yang Junwei does not agree, he believes that innovation is the process of constantly opening gaps, it is reported that by August 2022, Meituan drone delivery has completed 75,000 real orders, since the beginning of last year, FPI (the average number of automatic flights between the two human takeovers, the higher the FPI, the higher the level of automation of the unmanned aerial vehicle system) increased by dozens of times.
"[What we're going to do is) one plane serving one household, then multiple planes serving a community at the same time, evolving into multiple planes serving multiple communities from a centralized supply point, then connecting M communities to N supply points, and finally being able to weave a web."
Yang Junwei believes that in the process of new technology practice, people's attitudes will change from conservative to accepting and open. He gave an example: in the past, when foreign countries generally believed that when an aircraft flew in the air, the space interval between left and right should be equal to the flight altitude, but through a large number of simulations and physical flight tests, they found that such a large space was not needed at all, so the 1:1 industry acquiescence distance was reduced to 1:0.5.
"At the beginning, everyone always decided a rule in the most conservative way", in Yang Junwei's view, this is a common phenomenon at the beginning of the industry, "from feeling the stones to cross the river, to the stones gradually appearing, and gradually everyone feels that this place is solid, it has become a road."