Orange Persimmon Interactive Reporter Chu Fan Photography Chen Zhongqiu Poster Design Li Qianfang
The day before meeting Chu Xiang, his office in the Huaxing Science and Technology Building received a courier for Jack Ma. On March 4, 2000, Ma Yun took the "Eighteen Arhats" to move out of the four bedrooms and two living rooms in the lakeside garden, and pressed the accelerator button for Ali's take-off here.
It wasn't until he moved in that Chu Xiang knew that Ali had been here. He specially transformed Ma Yun's office into a tea room for guests, so that everyone who came could feel the "entrepreneurial spirit", and also saved him the trouble of thinking of various opening remarks.
At the beginning of his business, Jack Ma positioned Alibaba's mission as "making it easy to do business in the world". Unexpectedly, 20 years later, a group of young people with dreams began to practice the mission they found in the same office area: "Let there be no difficult road in the world".
Thousands of cars, thousands of roads
Real-time "CT" for Hangzhou's roads
Back in 2018, Chu Xiang and his partners founded Yuntu Technology in a 3-square-meter cubicle, and later gave their system a well-meaning name "Cloud Tantu". It is not complicated to explain, and digital means such as artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing are used to solve road "diseases" and ensure that roads are healthy and smooth.
In 2018, the team discussed late at night.
Road maintenance work, hidden in the back of urban life. "Road construction teams usually work from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., when the roads are at their emptyest. At that time, in order to understand all aspects of road maintenance work, Chu Xiang, who was still studying at Zhejiang University, followed the construction team of the municipal company for a whole summer to familiarize himself with the maintenance business and understand the pain points of the industry.
Late night work
One of the obvious difficulties is the inspection of the condition of the road surface. Urban roads can usually only rely on manual inspection to report limited information, grade highways will do a major inspection once a year, by a professional company through the inspection vehicle to drag a large equipment to scan the road surface, a single cost of thousands of yuan per kilometer.
Can we use technical means to solve this problem at low cost? Chu Xiang and the others quickly peeled off the cocoon and gave a solution: the technology was handed over to professional software and hardware equipment, and the low cost was handed over to the "social forces". It is said that the latter was the inspiration that Chu Xiang got when he read "Mao Zedong's Selected Works".
Taking Hangzhou as an example, there are currently more than 1,000 taxis, buses, engineering vehicles and other vehicles in the city equipped with Yuntu Technology's intelligent hardware, driving in all corners of tens of thousands of roads in Hangzhou every day, and transmitting back road information in real time. They are like a mobile "physical examination CT machine" specially developed for roads and urban "capillaries".
Precise identification of road "diseases"
Designing a "Road Health Code" for Cities
This hardware independently developed by Yuntu has been updated to the fourth generation, and the current upgraded product is a palm-sized "small black box" with 20 kinds of precision sensors and GPU chips built-in. "Many of the components are developed by ourselves or jointly developed with manufacturers, and all hardware is localized. Chu Xiang said.
A "little black box" in the car
In the background, the "Cloud Smooth Road" divides the city road into a grid of "3 meters × 3 meters", and uses three colors "red, yellow and green" to represent health status. When the vehicle drives over the pothole road surface and produces bumps or detects various road diseases, the small black box will automatically identify the road problem and upload it to the system, and the grid will turn yellow or red in the system, prompting the road section maintenance personnel to receive and deal with it in time.
When the red code appears, "Cloud Smooth Road" will automatically push the corresponding road surface "disease" information, and generate an event containing detailed information such as photos, type, location, etc., and distribute it to the mobile phone of the front-line maintenance workers, completing the closed-loop process of event distribution, on-site construction, repair report, effect evaluation, and record retention. To use a more figurative metaphor, this is like a "road health code" specially designed for roads.
Road Health Code
"Now, the perception field of view of the small black box can cover the front of the car and the left and right lanes, and collect road information around the clock. Chu Xiang revealed that at present, this system has been able to identify road problems in more than 20 different scenarios such as road damage, bridgehead jumping, manhole cover settlement, etc., and the detection accuracy of pavement problems is more than 95%.
In junior high school, you are the webmaster
A master of both physics and computer science
Chu Xiang, born in 1994, is a native of Hangzhou, and graduated from the School of Physics of Zhejiang University. This science man with a "scientist dream" also likes to study computer technology avidly.
Chu Xiang when he was a student
Chu Xiang's computer initiation was in the third grade of primary school, when his father had a computer, and like most families, the network cable was cut off from primary school students all year round. Chu Xiang could only start teaching himself ps in front of a copy of "Introduction to Photoshop", and draw some flat graphics in the software. He gradually became dissatisfied with plane drawing, so he taught himself 3D software and began to play stereoscopic modeling, and then learned programming, opening the door to the computer world step by step.
When he was in junior high school, he made a website through programming, which regularly updated various social information and experience sharing posts. He is both a webmaster and a customer service, and has also registered multiple mailboxes as "vests", in order to give the outside world the impression of a mature team, and relying on the accumulation of thousands of IP unique visits every day, he has successfully sold the website advertising space and maintained the operation of the website.
During his college years, he was still actively involved in programming competitions at home and abroad, and through competitions, he met partners who later started his own business together. Zhejiang University has always had a strong entrepreneurial atmosphere, and in 2018, the "Internet + concept" was in the limelight, and many students around me entered the fields of blockchain and artificial intelligence to start businesses.
"Maybe a dramatic story — like a fall that focuses on road construction and is determined to change the industry — is more moving. Chu Xiang said. But in fact, the choice of this industry is "deduced" by the team sitting together.
They analyzed the current situation of Internet development at that time, and there were so many consumer-facing platforms that it was difficult for start-up teams to "fight their way out". However, there is still room for Internet technology to show its strength in helping enterprises improve production capacity and providing decision-making support to regulatory authorities.
In the end, they chose the field of road transportation, where digitalization has great promise, and Chu Xiang believes that this is a path that "logically has the best chance of commercialization". If the success of entrepreneurship must have a hint of fate, he remembered that in those years, the Tianmu Mountain Road next to the company was building a new subway, and the sound of "tuk tuk" ran through the difficult early stage of entrepreneurship.
Early in the business
Participate in the Asian Games road support
It has saved tens of millions of dollars for a district in Hangzhou
In April 2020, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the "Opinions on Building a More Perfect System and Mechanism for Market-oriented Allocation of Factors", which clearly listed data as one of the five major factors of production, and the era of digital economy began.
In that year, Yuntu Technology officially released version 2.0 of Tantu on the cloud, and Chu Xiang and they had a big data cloud dream: to use the huge social computing power to help build a smart city road governance system.
System map
Road supervision is closely related to everyone's travel safety and has always been a key issue in urban management. The cost of road maintenance is increasing across the country, and the era of "aging" roads has arrived.
Last year, Hangzhou Urban Management made full use of the "Cloud Smooth Road" scenario to promote the intelligence, digitalization and refinement of municipal inspection, management and maintenance in order to ensure the smoothing of urban roads during the Asian Games.
At present, in Hangzhou, the "Cloud Smooth Road" has covered 13 districts and counties (cities) in the city, and has been promoted to Shaoxing, Ningbo, Wenzhou, Hefei, Chongqing, Wuhan and other places, testing and dealing with more than 100,000 cases of road problems, with a cumulative mileage of 370 million kilometers, enough for 500 round-trips to the earth and month.
After the use of an urban area in Hangzhou, the cost of municipal road supervision has dropped by nearly eighty percent, saving an average of more than 12 million yuan a year.
Yuntu Technology has developed into a national high-tech enterprise and a specialized and special new small and medium-sized enterprise in Zhejiang Province. "Tantu on the Cloud" has also been included in the "14th Five-Year Plan for Urban Management in Hangzhou", which has become a model project for urban digital management from the name of a company's system.
In the future, they will expand more scenarios. "We already have cases on highways and rural roads, and we will further expand the scope of road inspections in the future. Chu Xiang said, "We hope to give full play to the value of data elements on traffic roads, and better ensure that pedestrians and vehicles can 'travel smoothly'." ”
It's terrifyingly real! How did he become famous seven years ago, and how did he influence more than 50,000 medical students?
View
Turning cells into beef will eventually cost 20 percent less than slaughtered meat! This matter researched by the post-90s guy in Hangzhou may replace 8 percent of slaughtered meat in the future
The stock price of individual stocks soared by 230%! The low-altitude economy is soaring, and this Hangzhou man has been deeply cultivated for 9 years, in order to let you get express delivery and takeaway earlier
The post-95 girl in Hangzhou has published papers in the world's top journals as a work, all the way from Wenlan, Xuejun to Zhejiang University...
Fashion "genius catcher" Zheng Zeyu | New quality productivity youth
Gene "full-time hunter" Hada | New quality productivity youth
Editor in charge: Tong Wei
Review: Chen Yi Liang Yingjie