The efficiency of logistics transportation was increased by 17 times when drones were used to transport agricultural products.
It took only 7 minutes to transport fruits from orchards to airports, solving the "urgent, difficult, dangerous, and detour" problems of land transportation... The successful cooperative transportation of 21 drones nationwide has greatly improved the logistics transportation efficiency by 17 times, expanding the application scenarios of low-altitude logistics in China. For the main R&D team of drone technology, United Aircraft Group (hereinafter referred to as "United Aircraft"), from the laboratories in Beijing, Shenzhen and other places to the foot of Li peaches orchard in Wuxiang, Chongqing, the secret of success not only includes more than a decade of technical accumulation, but also the courage and innovation of the R&D team to try and innovate in the absence of any precedents. On July 31, Reporter had a dialogue with United Aircraft to decode how 21 drones achieved coordinated transportation, and how low-altitude enterprises should seize the favorable policies to promote the development of low-altitude economy in Beijing.
In less than 2 hours, the transportation time was shortened to just 7 minutes.
On July 2, as the Wu Mountain Li plums opened for harvest, 21 drones took off into the sky, carrying juicy and ripe Li plums to the Wushan Airport in Chongqing. It only took half a day for the freshly picked Li plums to reach the shelves of supermarkets in cities like Nanjing and Shanghai, and into the hands of consumers.
The aerial transportation of Wu Mountain Li plums was the first time in China that 21 drones coordinated their transportation, using a TD550 coaxial unmanned helicopter developed by the United Aircraft Group and 20 Q20 quadcopter flight platforms.
The director of the Low-altitude Economic Research Institute of the United Aircraft Group, Xiang Zitao, explained that low-altitude logistics delivery is an important application direction in the low-altitude industry, including drone delivery of meals, same-city express delivery, and feeder logistics. Unlike single drone delivery, the key to coordinated transportation lies in "coordination," i.e., the coordination of drones of different sizes and configurations, as well as the coordination of manned aircraft and drones.
In the latter coordination model, manned aircraft are mainly responsible for long-haul and part of the feeder transportation, while different types of drones are responsible for feeder and end-of-line logistics transportation, thus meeting the logistics transportation requirements for timeliness - this is the unique advantage of the low-altitude coordinated transportation mode.
Xiang Zitao said that the efficiency improvement in the four scenarios of "urgent, difficult, dangerous, and detour" is very obvious in low-altitude coordinated transportation.
In the past, postal trucks needed to drive from orchards at an altitude of 200-300 meters at the foot of the mountain to the airport at an altitude of 1,700 meters in Wushan. Although the straight-line distance was only 3-4 kilometers, it took nearly 2 hours to drive. As the altitude increased, the weather on the 30-kilometer mountain road was unpredictable, with frequent geological disasters such as mudslides and landslides caused by summer rainstorms. Meanwhile, the visibility was relatively low due to the fog at the top.
The coordinated transportation of drones can effectively solve the problems faced by land transportation. The data provided by United Planes shows that the coordinated transportation of drones can shorten the nearly 2-hour land transportation to 7 minutes, increasing the transportation efficiency by 86.7%.
Moreover, the coordinated transportation of drones also makes it possible for agricultural products to be flown directly from the main production areas to Wushan Airport.
Xiang Zhaotao said that before, the jujubes from the orchards had to be transported to Jiangbei International Airport for 9 hours and then to more than 1,000 cities across the country for a longer time. Now, after the drones arrive at Wushan Airport and undergo transfer processing, the jujubes will be rushed to the Wushan-Nanjing airmail flight and delivered to customers across the country.
"The overall transportation efficiency has been increased by 17 times," Xiang Zhaotao said.
The "mutual pursuit" of technology and scenarios
In fact, although the coordinated transportation task took place in Wushan, Xiang Zhaotao, the head of the joint aircraft project, said that the majority of the R&D team for the joint aircraft was based in Beijing. From the Beijing base of the joint aircraft to various application scenarios across the country, Xiang Zhaotao said that this was a "mutual pursuit" between technology and scenarios over and over again.
In recent years, there have been significant changes in China's drone logistics transportation market. According to the Shenzhen Drone Industry Association's estimate, by 2024, the domestic market size of drones will reach 16 billion yuan, with the market size for drone logistics estimated at around 3 billion yuan. The latest data from the Civil Aviation Administration of China also shows that by the end of 2024, the cumulative flight hours of drones will reach 9.816 million hours, an increase of 134,000 hours over the previous year.
In this booming trend, new demands such as instant delivery, delivery to remote areas, and delivery of special items are emerging, while new scenarios such as urban shopping circles and community delivery, cross-city express delivery, and agricultural and emergency rescue are also being gradually expanded.
For low-altitude enterprises, on the one hand, they need to match the existing advanced technologies with new scenarios, and on the other hand, they also need to update their technologies based on new scenarios.
Xiang Zhaotao revealed that in order to successfully complete the coordinated transportation task of Li peaches, he and his team also iterated various technologies.
At the platform end, the coordinated transportation scenario requires a "butler" to allocate tasks in real time, make decisions, generate flight trajectory plans, and monitor flight status, etc. Xiang Zhaotao introduced that the intelligent airspace command and control system developed by the joint aircraft is the one that plays this role.
However, the development of the "butler" was not smooth sailing.
According to Xiang Zhaotao's recollection, in the process of developing and iterating the intelligent airspace command and control system, drone operations were trending towards high density development. Consequently, the intelligent airspace command and control system also needed to control the flight interval of drones. However, in actual application, there were no precedents for high-density drone flights.
When flying in high density, what is the safe interval between aircraft? How should the departure times be set to maximize efficiency? These problems were troubling Xiang Zhaotao and his team.
"The final parameters were all tested out by our team, bit by bit." In Xiang Zhaotao's description, three departments of researchers cooperated with each other during the test, the hardware department equipped the drones with sensing devices and transponders, the software department adjusted the algorithms for the system, and when all the hardware and software were in place, the test flight department deliberately sought out actual test flight scenarios and intentionally created collision crises to test the system's maximum capabilities. "When several drones are too close to each other, all three departments' colleagues will break out in a cold sweat. Although we have also taken precautions against collisions, every test is still nerve-wracking," Xiang Zitao said.
When a new product needs to be tested or there is a major version update of the product, R&D personnel need to travel from the R&D base in Beijing to the test site to witness the testing process and intervene to make adjustments. Xiang Zitao told Beijing Business Daily that some colleagues involved in the testing of key models have even been stationed abroad for half a year.
"As the number of tests increases, we have also accumulated a lot of test data. We are now building a simulation testing model based on these data, and the efficiency of the test has greatly improved," Xiang Zitao said. As R&D personnel, the most sincere wish is to do a good job of the technology. "Even if there is no precedent to refer to, we can achieve independent R&D through trial and error. This is the love and perseverance of R&D personnel in the industry."
Cooperate with universities to attract talents
As for how enterprises can balance revenue and cost inputs, Xiang Zitao admitted that in the early and middle stages of the industry's development, enterprises may But Xiang Zitao also said that the low-altitude market in China has great development potential, and from the perspective of company operation, continued investment in logistics transportation is still very beneficial for the development of United Aircraft.
At the same time, besides logistics transportation, Xiang Zitao said that United Aircraft is also continuously operating other core businesses, and the overall business development is relatively stable.
In May, the Beijing Economy and Information Technology Bureau released the "Action Plan for Promoting the High-Quality Development of the Low-altitude Economy Industry (2024-2027) (Draft for Comments)"， proposing that Beijing will strive to increase the number of low-altitude economy-related enterprises to over 5,000 within three years. The same month, Beijing Fengtai District announced that it aims to form 1-2 mature and stable, safe and reliable, and efficient low-altitude command and dispatch systems within a year. Beijing Fangshan District also said that it aims to achieve this goal within three years by laying out the low-altitude supervision and control system, building an industrial park with a low-altitude intelligent manufacturing feature, creating diverse scenarios such as emergency rescue and material delivery, and constructing a "main-trunk-branch" landing point network.
In the eyes of Xiang Lizhi, vice president of United Aircraft and general manager of its Beijing base, the drone industry is a technology-driven industry, and the demand for high-end talents is very large. Beijing has a strong foundation in technology and talent, with numerous universities and research institutes, providing a rich talent pool for low-altitude economy industries such as drones. "At present, United Aircraft is cooperating with Tsinghua University, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Beijing Institute of Technology and other universities on R&D cooperation. We are jointly tackling technical issues and at the same time recruiting reserve R&D talents from universities. We are also closely cooperating with enterprises up and down the industrial chain," said Sun Liren.
In addition, Sun Liren said that United Aircraft has also begun to apply drones in Beijing. For example, in the summer of last year's flood relief operation in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, a drone rescue team carried out emergency material transportation and communication relay tasks in Mentougou and other places.
Jin Wei, deputy secretary-general of the China Drone Industry Innovation Alliance, said that Beijing's economic capital structure is complete, which is conducive to forming a low-altitude economy industry cluster. The low-altitude flight market has considerable development potential. With the support of favorable policies, if the logistics delivery and manned air transportation in the low-altitude economy sector can all achieve normalized operation in the future, each sector may be able to unlock a trillion-yuan market.
