In the cold winter of capital, landing is king, and Yikong Zhijia has obtained 60 million yuan of angel round financing.
Driverless, one of the hottest concepts in the science and technology circle, has been spreading endless charm for more than ten years, attracting the best companies in the world to join in it, and giants such as Google, Baidu and Tesla are all eager for it. Suddenly, the era of driverless seems to be coming to the fore. However, due to technical problems and the ebb tide of capital, today, the real unmanned driving is still in still hiding half her face from us behind her guitar.
However, history will eventually thank those pioneers who persisted before dawn. On July 2, 2019, Yikong Zhijia announced that it had obtained 60 million yuan angel round financing exclusively invested by Xingtao Investment. This cutting-edge company aiming at mine unmanned driving broke into the industry’s field of vision with this big operation.
In the cold winter of capital, landing is king. What are the advantages of easy control and intelligent driving that can be favored by others? The story of founder Wason presents a blueprint for technological and commercial innovation.
Follow the tide of "mine" unmanned landing, and make a decision before moving.
Under the double superposition of the downward heat and the cold winter of capital, the valuation of the driverless industry returned to rationality in 2019. In this case, if you don’t land, you won’t survive. This is easy to control and drive. Compared with other scenes, the mine scene with relatively closed roads, relatively simple scenes, relatively fixed routes and not restricted by open road traffic regulations has become one of the best choices for unmanned landing.
The survey results show that driverless driving is just needed for mines. There are some problems in the mining industry, such as difficulty in recruiting personnel, rising labor cost and management cost, low intelligence of traditional operation mode, lack of information management means, and inability to conduct intelligent optimal scheduling according to real-time production information, which urgently requires scientific and technological innovation, upgrading and empowerment. The improvement of mine production efficiency by scientific and technological innovation has also been verified.
In 2005, Komatsu, Japan began to test the unmanned transportation system in a copper mine in Chile, and installed a variety of sensors, controllers and communication components on the existing models to ensure that they can run automatically under control instructions. In 2008, Komatsu unmanned mining vehicle was first commercialized in Chile copper mine. Since then, the commercial verification in the past ten years shows that unmanned driving has a great effect on improving the efficiency of mine operation.
The operational data show that more than 200 unmanned mining vehicles have transported more than 2 billion tons of ore, the transportation cost has been reduced by 15%, the tire life has been improved by 40%, and the transportation efficiency has been improved by 30%.
In addition, the strong support of the policy also makes the mine one of the best landing scenes. For example, the "open-pit mine card driverless system" has been listed as a key research and development project in the document "Important R&D Catalogue of Coal Mine Robots" announced by the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety No.1 in 2019. All these favorable factors have made mine unmanned driving enter a rapidly rising track, and these are the key factors for easy control and intelligent driving.
Technical reserve+business innovation, the easy-to-control way to break the situation
Of course, huge demand also means fierce competition. In the face of challenges, Yikong Zhijia chooses polishing technology and products, innovates business models, creates value for customers, and promotes the vigorous development of unmanned driving in mines.
On the one hand, in view of the complex working conditions of the mine, Easy Control Intelligent Driving put forward the overall solution of mine unmanned driving, including four parts: operation monitoring platform, unmanned driving system, LTE－V2X communication technology and customized design of mine car.
In terms of platform, Easy-to-Control Intelligent Driving refers to the mature commercial vehicle networking system and the traditional mining vehicle dispatching system, takes big data mining, 4G/5G wireless Internet of Things and intelligent remote control as the core means, and encapsulates complex vehicle bus information processing, mobile communication data processing, load balancing, big data management and analysis, and server cluster technology based on distributed architecture to build a platform suitable for unmanned mining vehicle operation.
In the aspect of driverless system, Easy Control Intelligent Driver independently develops algorithms such as perception, decision-making, planning and control to meet the requirements of mine scenes, and adopts multi-sensor perception and positioning fusion schemes including laser radar, millimeter-wave radar and camera to effectively cope with various working conditions of all-weather operation. The system meets the development trend of mining modernization and lays an important foundation for digital mining.
In terms of LTE－V2X, easy-controlled intelligent driving has formed an operational complete network system, which can provide reliable communication capabilities in high-frequency and high-traffic environments, and is more mature in terms of large capacity, low delay, anti-interference and manageability. Easy-to-control and smart-drive LTE-V2X has three advantages: low deployment cost and reuse of existing cellular network infrastructure; Wide coverage, which can be extended to the non-line-of-sight range of hundreds of meters or more; The data transmission rate is high, with 500Mbps upstream and 1Gbps downstream at the peak.
In terms of custom design of mine car, Yikong Zhijia relies on TLI series wire-controlled intelligent vehicles independently developed by Tongli Heavy Industry to optimize the pre-installation matching of unmanned hardware configuration and communication protocol matching.
Wason emphasized that the easy-to-control intelligent driving unmanned driving system puts safety first. This system can avoid colliding with other equipment and personnel working in the mine through various technical means such as V2X communication, multi-sensor fusion and platform management, with full redundancy design and safety above all else.
On the other hand, easy-controlled smart driving also has a clear plan in business. The strategy of easy control and intelligent driving is to upgrade the dimension of research and development, reduce the dimension of operation, and choose the mine as the subdivision scene to make efforts. Many head mining enterprises across the country have expressed their intention to cooperate.
Among them, Tongli Heavy Industry, a wide-body car head company, has reached cooperation. Tongli in the field of wide-body vehicles accounts for more than 40% of the market share. From the beginning of 2017, it began research and development of by-wire control technology, and set up an intelligent team at the end of 2018 to vigorously promote the intelligence, informationization, electrification and unmanned mining vehicles. Through cooperation with Tongli, E-control has taken a perfect step in commercialization. At present, two wide-body vehicles have been tested in Ordos mining area and received excellent feedback.
According to the "five-year plan" of easy control and intelligent driving, under the premise of safe and reliable system, it is planned to realize unmanned group trial operation at the end of 2019, with a group scale of 8-10 wide-body vehicles, achieving about 80% labor benefits; In 2020, it is planned to realize unmanned group operation, with a group size of about 20 wide-body vehicles, achieving labor benefits of about 90%; In 2021, the group scale will be about 100 wide-body vehicles, achieving 100% labor benefits; In 2022, the group scale is about 500 wide-body vehicles, achieving 110% labor benefits; In 2023, the group scale is about 2000 wide-body vehicles, achieving 120% labor benefits.
ALL IN！ Entrepreneurial veterans, where is the confidence?
All in is driverless, creating an easy-to-control intelligent driving. Wason not only wants to "toss", but also means to change an industry.
As an entrepreneurial veteran, Wason has a successful entrepreneurial experience in the fields of Internet and new energy vehicles, and its Internet companies have achieved sales revenue of more than one billion yuan for many years. He is also a shareholder of a listed company of mining transportation equipment. As a Class A supplier, he provides nearly 200 million yuan of mining equipment to Shenhua Group every year, and the world-famous Australian BHP Billiton is also an important customer.
Based on years of successful entrepreneurial experience and abundant resources in the mining industry, Wason and co-founder Zhang Lei are full of confidence in the future of Easy Control and Intelligent Driving. It is understood that co-founder Zhang Lei was born in Yutong Bus and has been working on Yutong’s autonomous driving research and development. The common goal of the two of them is to make easy-controlled smart driving a cutting-edge innovation force in the field of driverless driving.
It is also known that Yikong Zhijia has set up a core team of more than 20 people, whose members have first-class backgrounds such as Baidu, Yutong, FAW, Dongfang Measurement and Control, Qianfang and Tsinghua Unmanned Vehicle Team, covering unmanned driving, car networking, smart cars, smart mines and other fields. It is worth noting that easy-controlled intelligent driving not only attaches importance to algorithmic talents, but also attaches importance to the construction of comprehensive landing teams, including vehicle engineering and mining majors.
It is precisely because of this that Xingtao Investment chose easy control and intelligent driving. At present, the development of unmanned driving industry is much slower than expected, and mine unmanned driving is a main track at present. From this perspective, the future of easy control and intelligent driving is indeed infinite.
At present, the demand for mine unmanned driving at home and abroad is on the rise. No matter from the application, or from the cost control and safety improvement, the unmanned commercial use of mining has great imagination space. The mine unmanned driving enterprises represented by easy control and intelligent driving are gradually narrowing the gap with foreign countries, and accelerating the landing and practical use. If there is no accident, in the next few years, the local driverless technology company will hand over a perfect answer sheet.