Yang Jing is from The Temple of Oufei
Qubits | Official account QbitAI
When you walk to the street and suddenly see several drones carrying items back and forth between high-rise buildings in the city, what kind of rush is it?
note! This is not the future, nor is it a scene from a game movie.
This really happened in Shenzhen, which has become the daily routine of the people in Pingshan District and Longgang District - you can receive takeaway delivered by drones in 15 minutes.
You may not think about it, and you may not be able to empathize with the convenience of it.
But the reason why it is worth paying attention to is not only about the progress of technology and implementation, but also means the establishment of technical standards and the improvement of infrastructure.
Recently, there have been clearer policy plans to move drone logistics to the front of the stage.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China officially issued the "14th Five-Year Plan" Special Plan for the Development of Aviation Logistics ((Civil Aviation Fa [2022] No. 7), hereinafter referred to as the "Planning").
This is the first time that Civil Aviation of China has compiled a special plan for the development of air logistics, which will provide accurate guidance for the construction of a high-quality, efficient, independent and controllable air logistics system.
The Plan clearly states:
Support drone logistics exploration. Promote the construction of civil unmanned aerial aviation test bases (test areas), explore the characteristics and laws of the operation and development of civil unmanned aerial vehicles, and study and compile unmanned aerial vehicle management regulations, normative documents and technical standard systems. Focusing on UAV logistics, establish general aviation logistics regulations and standards to achieve airworthiness and operation, verification and management coordination. Promote the standard coordination between unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned vehicles, unmanned warehouses, and smart logistics platforms, and strengthen operation management and risk prevention and control.
In fact, like infrastructure technologies such as 5G, urban logistics drones are racing on both sides of the Pacific.
This time, Shenzhen ran in the forefront of this competition, taking advantage of the opportunity of the time and place.
Drones for logistics?
The big logic of drones is very simple, that is, "automatic driving" in the air.
In addition to undertaking some tasks (such as video entertainment, cruise survey, agricultural plant protection), it can carry people and goods, and does not require a driver, and the scene is the troposphere - low altitude.
Manned, these two years have become increasingly hot "flying cars".
Cargo loading, i.e. drone logistics.
Compared with the manned, the cargo route lands faster, the output value is more direct, and because of the rigid demand, safety and imagination space, it starts earlier.
Ten years ago, the possibility of carrying goods was already being explored.
This includes Google, but also Amazon.
In 2012, Google X quietly set up a project "Wing" to develop drone-based freight technology;
In 2013, Bezos proposed the concept of logistics drone terminal distribution, and opened the research and development and testing of Amazon drone delivery.
In the same year, SF in Shenzhen also began to explore.
……
With the emergence of eager people on both sides of the ocean, the field of logistics drones has explored three major paths.
Instant takeaway, express logistics, emergency delivery.
(Refers only to light and small drones, the total weight is generally under 25 kg; source: public information)
Each road has a first echelon of players who have entered or are about to enter the normal operation.
The emergency delivery team represented by Xun Ant and UPS has high value and strong immediacy of delivery items, and has taken the lead in realizing normal operation in densely populated urban areas.
However, like land logistics, emergency distribution is still a special scenario compared to the demand for the latter two routes.
The express logistics represented by Fengyi (SF), JD.com and Amazon adopts the route of "rural encirclement of the city", taking the lead in landing in rural remote areas, fresh distribution, island, alpine logistics and other transportation scenarios.
This is not difficult to understand. After all, in some inconvenient areas, such as islands, mountains and some long-distance scenarios, the advantages of UAV logistics are more obvious and easier to land, which not only ensures efficiency, but also ensures safety.
Let's look at the real-time takeaway representatives led by Meituan and Wing, focusing on the logistics scene at the end of the city.
This scenario has a large demand, strong immediacy, and small load capacity, so it can be quickly started compared with the first two paths.
It is worth mentioning that on this path, two different models have been developed according to different national conditions.
Meituan in China is directly settled in a city with high population density to undertake the platform's own distribution business; Wing is facing Europe and the United States, taking the lead in landing in sparsely populated suburbs and cooperating with retailers to promote.
Therefore, on the question of how to send and how to send, the model of the three major factions is the answer to the latest industry practice.
At the same time, the value of urban logistics drones has also been revealed in the exploration of models.
In densely populated urban centers, where ground transportation is cumbersome and congested, and distribution needs are only going to grow, existing forms of ground logistics will soon encounter efficiency bottlenecks.
The form of air transport by drone is undoubtedly bringing qualitative changes to the existing urban logistics network.
And this, at present, is indeed only done by drones.
As Bezos originally proposed the vision of "half an hour delivery to home", drone delivery can make the original 30 minutes of land delivery mileage in a few minutes.
And once the scale goes up, even if a single saves 1 yuan, it will save a lot of costs for the enterprise.
But if you want the business process to run through, you still face the most critical problem -
How to land on a large scale.
How to scale? On the surface, it is a policy and license, but in fact, behind it is a set of data, scenarios and ecological iterations of technology.
In other words, it is a set of future-oriented urban infrastructure.
According to the inherent logic, the key to affecting the landing of drone technology lies in policy access.
However, in the case of the United States, which followed the original law and took the lead in establishing a regulatory system, the current drone delivery area is still limited to smaller, remote towns:
Wing, which has been in the market for nearly a decade and has accumulated 140,000 deliveries, only expanded its business to Texas, the largest state in the southern United States, only in the second half of last year;
Amazon, which has attracted much attention, is still in the testing stage, and it has also been exposed to the embarrassing situation of layoffs and dissolution of the R& D team.
It can be seen that the policy access is only one of the necessary conditions for promoting the landing of drones, and the essence lies in the real application scenarios and data iterations.
Realistic application scenarios determine the demand and commercialization of the closed loop.
Data iteration means that the system will continue to improve with time and iteration, form standards, and establish barriers.
China, perhaps seeing the key early on, took a different approach to advancement.
According to the existing policy requirements, domestic enterprises have two ways to obtain the application for transportation/business licenses.
One is the application for the trial operation of a specific type of drone. Xunant is the first company in the industry (2019) to obtain this qualification, and then EHang (2020) and Fengniao (SF's large-scale unmanned aerial vehicle, early 2022) obtained a trial operation license. It is understood that the US group has also entered the final approval stage.
The other is the logistics pilot demonstration method. In the early days, Fengyi (under SF) and Jingdong adopted this method, which adopted the principle of one matter and one discussion, and different enterprises could set up demonstration areas in specific areas according to different scenarios.
For example, SF has set up a hairy crab distribution demonstration area on the shore of Yangcheng Lake.
Lu Renren, director of the Department of General Aviation of the Civil Aviation Management Cadre College of China, explained to Qubit that the two permits are one from the perspective of operational safety and the other from the perspective of economic management.
Based on such a pilot and trial operation system, there have been large-scale drone shuttles on the streets of first-tier cities.
But what needs to be further explained is why China's approach is developing faster.
Because of the biggest difference from the US regulations, China's existing policy is not to rush to promote the design of top-level regulations, but to start from the pilot trial operation and explore real scenarios and applications with industry players.
This is similar to autonomous driving, and the pilot policies and interim measures that have blossomed everywhere are driving it a key step towards commercial development.
China has the richest and most extensive logistics drone scene.
Whether it's an existing island, a feeder line, a terminal distribution... In terms of urban low-altitude logistics alone, the building and population density, community and road conditions faced by drones are more challenging than existing foreign drone scenarios.
On the one hand, this has laid the foundation for the iteration of UAV technical data and algorithms, and on the other hand, it has also promoted the development of the UAV industry.
Mao Yinian, head of the UAV business of the US group, once revealed that when cooperating with the Japanese team and participating in the formulation of the project of aerial obstacle avoidance of UAVs in the International Organization for Standardization, the US group led the perception and avoidance of UAVs in urban scenes within 500 meters.
Because this is just a unique scene advantage of China.
In fact, this situation is not unfamiliar.
In the past, when the mobile Internet, mobile payment and other industries emerged, it was precisely because of the advantages of domestic scenes that we finally achieved technical overtaking in the world.
Nowadays, cutting-edge technologies such as automatic driving and drones are also developing rapidly under the impetus of the scene.
In the exploration of the cutting-edge urban infrastructure of the UAV, Shenzhen, the take-off situation is obvious.
Shenzhen's drone advantages
Shenzhen, the capital of hard technology, the "Silicon Valley" in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, is also one of the cities with the strongest "drone" label in the world.
But before that, Shenzhen's all-round advantages in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles have not been summarized by connecting points into lines.
Whether it is the time and place, or the people, Shenzhen has it.
The first is the time of day.
After more than ten years of development, to date, Shenzhen has formed a mature ecological industrial chain, as well as the industrial scale that is difficult to reach in other places, and accelerating the industrialization and development of unmanned aerial vehicles has become an inevitable trend.
In the industrial chain, Shenzhen UAV enterprises horizontally cover aerial photography, traffic patrols, exploration and mapping, plant protection, logistics and distribution, big data collection and other multi-field scenarios.
Vertically, full chain coverage has also been achieved.
In the upstream design link, the early model aircraft industry and carbon fiber industry laid the foundation for the development of the industrial chain;
In the midstream production process, the chip and mobile phone electronics industry empowers the design and research and development capabilities of parts and components required for UAV production;
In the downstream operation and maintenance service link, Shenzhen has bred many UAV pilot training institutions.
Some people even joked that without a zone, a drone can be built.
In terms of industrial scale, in 2020, Shenzhen has more than 1,200 UAV companies with an output value of 50 billion yuan. Its export scale has ranked first among cities in China for 28 consecutive years. Among them, the export volume of unmanned aerial vehicles reached 18 billion yuan, accounting for about 80% of the country's share.
Another big day is that the top domestic universities have settled in Shenzhen in batches and concentrated on exporting technological achievements and talents.
For example, Tsinghua, Peking University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Harbin Institute of Technology, northwestern polytechnical university have all settled in Shenzhen, and the establishment of branch campuses/research institutes in Shenzhen is undoubtedly to provide a strong reserve army for the development of the UAV industry.
After all, the competition of technology is, in the final analysis, the competition of talents.
Next, more UAV industrialization application breakthroughs and future technology research will be carried out in these talent reserves.
Then there's the location.
The reason why Shenzhen UAV logistics has such a vigorous development is inseparable from the support of the local government.
In addition to providing regular corporate tax breaks and sponsorship of large events, the government has also enacted local regulations that keep pace with the times.
In November 2018, the "Implementation Measures for the Flight Management of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Shenzhen (Provisional)" was announced, which classified the management of unmanned aerial vehicles, set up corresponding flight airspace, and launched the country's first comprehensive supervision platform for unmanned aerial vehicles jointly built by military and civilians.
Four months later, the "Interim Measures for the Management of Micro-light Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Shenzhen Citizens" was officially implemented, which greatly simplified the approval process for various types of unmanned aerial vehicles.
Even the vast majority of consumer drones can fly in suitable areas without applying for a flight plan.
At present, 60%-70% of the entire Shenzhen pilot area is classified as a fly-friendly area.
According to the Global Network, the use of Internet platforms to regulate the use of drones in the public and commercial fields is the first case in the world.
Before the arrival of the superior law, Shenzhen as a pioneer demonstration, such management methods can radiate to more cities.
There will be more data and applications, and it will feed back the development of drones.
There are industrial roots, and there is policy support.
Naturally, more industry players are attracted to Shenzhen to build "people".
The typical player of this, Meituan, with the support of the military and local civilian management departments, has been operating in 8 communities such as Pingshan and Longgang in Shenzhen for nearly a year.
Today, the cumulative delivery of 19,000 orders, covering more than 8,000 households, has just opened the country's first drone business circle distribution - Longgang Galaxy COCO Park.
It is said that it takes less than 15 minutes to deliver the milk tea delivered by the drone.
In this process, the operation team of Meituan has also gained a lot of experience.
For example, the noise problem of user-side feedback, the technical team revealed that it has upgraded a version of the silent paddle, which is about half the sound of the two-blade paddle.
There are also some unexpected problems, such as windy weather, order volume surge, background system crash, etc., there are standard manual guidance and regular simulation exercises.
Many cognitions can only be tested in practice.
In the case of windy weather, the conventional thinking is to "take over first." But after the practice, the leader of the Meituan Pilot team revealed that when encountering strong winds, they tend to choose to "believe in the plane first" until the hovering and then take over - because the ability to automatically hover and even automatically force the landing has been increasing day by day, and many times it is more stable than manual.
From the research and development of drone technology, testing and now to the landing and operation, in fact, it is becoming part of the construction infrastructure.
Based on such favorable times and places, it is not difficult to understand why such a logistics drone that heralds urban infrastructure opportunities will take off in Shenzhen.
Future-proof infrastructure
But paying attention to the new progress of drone distribution is not only about the past and the present – Shenzhen has a foundation, China has an advantage.
More importantly, it is a future-oriented urban infrastructure system, but also a race against technical standards.
In fact, from the day this concept was born, urban logistics drones have been pinned on high hopes.
In addition to bringing direct cost-effectiveness to enterprises, the more realistic problems represented in the Chinese scenario are expected to be solved.
The trend of social aging is becoming more and more serious, and the existing human resources will not be able to adapt to the increasingly large urban logistics and distribution needs.
Meituan had predicted that in the next 5 years, the demand for instant delivery from users will rise. Its financial report for the third quarter of last year showed that the number of takeaway orders in the quarter increased by 25% year-on-year.
The existing million-level rider scale cannot carry the future order volume.
Then the "new species" in the era of unmanned aerial vehicles and automatic delivery vehicles naturally play the role of capacity supplementation.
Compared with automatic delivery vehicles, the role of drones has a stronger meaning of "open innovation".
This is an unprecedented and unique character.
In the past, air traffic was isolated from the city, and the city center was the world of ground transportation.
The emergence of drones has directly expanded urban space from the original two-dimensional to three-dimensional, and the value of low altitude is being excavated.
Professor Lu Renren, director of the Department of General Aviation of the Civil Aviation Management Cadre College of China, said,
In the past, the civil aviation industry only did business in the suburbs, but now it can enter the urban areas and expand the objects of aviation benefits from one or two hundred million to more than a billion.
This is a disruptive development for the industry and must not be underestimated.
As more types of drones travel through cities, the fusion flight of multiple drones will become a challenge.
The digital and intelligent air management system will continue to evolve and improve, and there will be opportunities to extend to more aviation fields, and the dividends of the industrial Internet will also spread in the civil aviation industry.
In the past, there was a "car" and then a "road", and now the "car road" is integrated, which can promote the landing of low-altitude distribution faster.
At the same time, in the whole process, the state has established technical standards and discourse power.
And such a frontier field, China has autonomy from the beginning -
Whether it is the early development and testing of UAVs, trial operation, or the current stage of normalization and scale.
Just as before the popularization of 5G construction, 5G technology exploration is accompanied by the establishment of more landing standards.
Whoever leads the establishment of standards is likely to lead the industry.
The development of china's urban logistics drones is at such a critical moment.
Is China in the next city after the consumer-grade drone, agricultural plant protection drones lead?
Now, this possibility, is pressed the open button.