Reporter|Yang Song
Edited by Tan Lu
In the office of the Beijing headquarters of Yikong Intelligent Driving, Lin Qiao, vice president of strategy of the company, turned on the big screen, and the real-time display on the intelligent cloud control platform was that the unmanned mining truck fleet was running in an orderly manner on the extra-large open-pit coal mine in Xinjiang, which was 3,000 kilometers away.
In this mine, the company has invested 203 unmanned vehicles, which is the largest unmanned fleet in the world, and operates 24 hours a day.
Founded in 2018 and joined by Lin Qiao in 2020, after graduating from Zhejiang University with a doctorate, he worked at Ali Cainiao Network as the hardware leader of the ET Lab of the autonomous driving department.
In an exclusive interview with the reporter of "21CBR", Lin Qiao said that among the top ten open-pit coal mines in China, Yikong Intelligent Driving has entered five and has reached cooperation with leading mining enterprises such as China Energy Group, TBEA, and Zijin Mining.
Commercialization is progressing rapidly, and Yikong Zhijia has received investment from Xingfu Capital, Shenwan Innovation Investment, Xinghang State Investment and Zijin Mining. In March, it received more than 300 million yuan in C++ round financing, and the total financing exceeded 700 million yuan in half a year.
Lin Qiao judged that 2024 is the first year of commercialization of unmanned mines, and it is expected that by the end of the year, the number of unmanned mining vehicles operated by Yikong Intelligent Driving in the mining area will increase to 1,000.
Here's what he had to say:
Onboarding in the mine
In 2018, the autonomous driving industry is very hot, and large manufacturers and star startups are focusing on large scenarios such as unmanned taxis and terminal delivery. There are few people who pay attention to unmanned vehicles in mines.
In 2019, I went to the Inner Mongolia mine where Yikong did experiments, and Zhang Lei, the chairman of the company, with several technicians, was developing a technical solution for unmanned vehicles in the mine.
From a technical point of view, the project is very land-oriented and is a completely closed scene. Moreover, the team is reliable and down-to-earth and can endure hardships.
In April 2020, I officially joined Yikong Zhijia and went directly to the mine and went to the Inner Mongolia mining area where research and development tests were underway.
Despite the preparations, after entering the mine, there was still a gap in my heart. The mine transportation conditions are bad, the mine carts drive by, and the dust is flying. The mine is located in a remote area, and the team goes out together every morning and returns together at 9 or 10 o'clock in the evening.
After staying in the mine for 3 months, the harvest is quite large, and the only way to truly understand the product is to bow down and enter the game.
Some peer companies, most of which are outsourced personnel on site. We are different, it is the core backbone who goes to the site to understand the product and business.
There are many subdivisions of unmanned mine products, what are the customer pain points corresponding to each product, and can we solve them and deliver them efficiently?
The pain points of customers are measured by our feet. After the survey comes out, it is necessary to identify the customer's pain points, because the R&D effort is limited, and the priority must be judged.
For example, we do the standard loading mode, from the perspective of unmanned driving, one car is loading, and the second car should be as far away as possible. The team's technological innovation brought the second vehicle closer together meant that the waiting time for loading was reduced to less than 20 seconds, improving the efficiency of the excavator.
I still maintain a high-frequency business trip to the mine, staying for about 2-4 months every year. In the past two years, the company has explored overseas markets, and I will also go to overseas mines.
Run-through mode
In the beginning, we only had two cars, and gradually moved to one group. First, the bicycle is adjusted, and then there is large-scale replication.
At the beginning, the team made it clear that it would adopt the front-loading mass production mode, and cooperate with Tongli, Yutong and other OEMs in the early stage to pre-embed unmanned driving kits.
In July 2020, we went to the Xinjiang mine to work in the customer scenario. In the beginning, it could only be operated during the day, because the technicians were required to constantly adjust the code. In 2021, the night shift will also be able to operate.
By June 2022, the team solved most of the safety problems and officially started the operation of unmanned vehicles, and the safety officers did not need to get on the car again.
Last year, we had a major breakthrough – revenue increased more than fourfold year-over-year, exceeding expectations. In Asia's highest-capacity open-pit coal mine, customers have increased demand, and with a scale of more than 200 vehicles, it has become the world's largest unmanned fleet of single mines.
The company has advantages in three aspects: product, technology and team.
In terms of products, we have the ability of modularization, generalization and platformization.
Taking the fleet as an example, the traffic density of three or five vehicles is low, and when it reaches 100 vehicles, the reliability and stability of the entire system need to be improved accordingly.
This puts forward higher requirements for unmanned technology, the dust on the mine road is very large, and the initial run is back and forth, and the dust brings more than 10 times of sudden braking. Now it's down to only once in 10 runs.
In terms of platformization, the company launched the third-generation mine unmanned driving system to create a cloud platform for intelligent vehicle collaboration. The system only does large scheduling, how to go specifically, and the unmanned vehicle makes its own decision-making and planning, and quickly solves various working conditions.
In this way, the dependence on infrastructure is reduced. If there is a problem with the communication network, the platform does not give instructions, and the car will run autonomously. Under the command of the third-generation system, the fleet can achieve 95% standardization and 5% personalized development.
Yikong Intelligent Driving has launched the unmanned transportation solution "Zhushan" for open-pit mines, including a wire-controlled mining truck equipped with the self-developed wire-controlled platform "Yushi", an intelligent cloud control platform, a vehicle-end unmanned driving system and a collaborative scheduling system.
Except for mines with great special working conditions, most of them can be deployed within a week, which greatly shortens the implementation period.
The cooperation between Yikong and OEMs is similar to Huawei's cooperation with Cialis, in that we provide OEMs with intelligent components and new energy power systems to adapt to different models.
These achievements are based on a stable core team. The core backbone of Yikong Intelligent Driving has the same cognition, which supports the product technology to iterate towards the same goal.
The essence of commercial vehicles is to make money and bring business value to customers.
From the perspective of operating costs, a car with 2-3 drivers has an annual labor cost of nearly 600,000 yuan. Driverless driving saves that money.
At present, the production efficiency brought by unmanned mining vehicles has not yet formed a significant advantage compared with manual labor. But judging by the endgame, it will definitely surpass the artificial.
Impact scale
In the unmanned fleet of large open-pit coal mines in Xinjiang, Yikong Intelligent Driving is being handed over to the miner. The technical team will be withdrawn, and only the relevant operational personnel will be left after the handover.
We are equivalent to building a direct store, running through the operation mode, and then letting go of the "franchise".
The large-scale operation of the benchmark mine project proves that the unmanned mine truck can work and lift volume.
The size of the domestic transportation market is about 200 billion yuan. China accounts for half of the world's coal production, and together with overseas coal mines and iron ores, it has a scale of about 600 billion yuan.
In terms of penetration rate, the penetration rate of unmanned vehicles was 5% last year. Compared with passenger cars, I estimate that unmanned driving in mines will reach about 10% this year.
Our company's strategy is relatively simple, to make large and high-quality mines. They are not very sensitive to the input costs of new technologies.
Some small private mines only have three or five vehicles, and the cost of supporting unmanned base stations is hundreds of thousands, which is not cost-effective.
In the domestic market, this year the company will continue to expand the size of the fleet on the basis of the existing mines. At the same time, the number of unmanned vehicles will increase from 300 last year to 1,000 in new mines.
Unmanned driving capabilities can also be used in more fields such as engineering intelligent inspection. In the past, workers needed to take a tape measure to measure the road in the mine, but now with an unmanned mining truck, the intelligent equipment can judge whether the road surface is qualified after a trip.
Zijin Mining, the company's strategic investor, has major mineral resources such as copper, gold and silver, and the operation complexity of metal mines is higher than that of coal mines, and it has not yet achieved large-scale implementation of unmanned fleets. At present, we are looking for suitable mining areas to do technical verification.
In addition, Zijin Mining has a large number of overseas businesses, and the R&D personnel of Yikong Intelligent Driving have gone to study several times. Overseas labor costs are higher, and they are more suitable for large-scale unmanned mining trucks.
Going overseas is the second growth curve of Easy Control, and it is currently focused on the Australian market. Its labor cost is higher than that of China, and it is also a big mining country, and it has close trade contacts with China.
We first landed in Australia, sorted out the local process system and standardization requirements, and then explored other markets.
Last year, I spent a month and a half in Australia, and this year I think I'll be staying longer. Yikong has set up a local subsidiary, and this year's goal is to carry out the project, starting with verification.
We judge that 2024 will be the first year of commercialization of unmanned driving. Some of the mining projects settled in by Yikong Intelligent Driving have come to the inflection point of commercialization, and it is hoped that this year will enter the stage of large-scale replication to accelerate the commercialization of unmanned mines.