In recent years, unmanned driving has become one of the topics that people focus on. Both the practitioners in the automotive industry and the consumers of automotive products have paid great attention to this topic.
But from a practical point of view, there is still a long way to go before the implementation and popularization of unmanned driving technology, and there are not a few people who think that it will be difficult to implement within ten years. So, is it really difficult for driverless technology to land within ten years? Where will its most likely first stop be?
01 | The status quo of unmanned driving: it can only be assisted, not unmanned
At present, the widely used grading method of unmanned driving technology divides unmanned driving technology into five levels from L1 to L5.
Among them, L1 means to provide driving assistance to one of the steering wheel or speed, while L5 means to rely entirely on the driverless system without any human operation.
At present, most of the mid-to-high-end models we can see in the market are equipped with L2 level unmanned driving technology, or more strictly speaking, "assisted driving technology".
L2-level unmanned driving technology can monitor the road conditions ahead through various sensors, cameras, etc., and realize speed control, automatic braking, and obstacle avoidance under certain conditions. However, due to the limitations of technical capabilities, these operations can only be used as an aid to the driver's control.
In fact, unmanned driving technology at the L3 level and below can only be called "assisted driving", for the same reason.
Of course, some models on sale are equipped with better technology than L2 level unmanned driving, which is generally called L2.5 level or L2+ level. Vehicles with L2.5 driverless vehicles also support lane recognition beyond the L2 level to help vehicles merge, keep lanes and give early warning of lane departures.
As for L3 level and higher unmanned driving technology, it can only be tested on closed roads or open roads with relevant regulations.
The reason for such a regulation, I believe the friends will also be able to think of it. On open roads, people and vehicles are densely populated, and the traffic situation is very complicated, especially on narrow roads with a large flow of people, pedestrians and objects occupying the road and emergencies all place high requirements on the unmanned driving system. If you want to entrust the driving operation to the system, you need higher technical strength.
So, does this mean that the current driverless technology is useless?
of course not. In many industries, unmanned driving has begun to show its strength, helping people reduce the waste of human resources and improve production efficiency.
02 | Unmanned driving, a good helper for enterprise production
In the civilian field, unmanned driving systems are still in the stage of assisted driving and technical testing. However, the production environment of enterprises is often not as complicated as that of open roads. Therefore, in some agricultural and industrial productions, unmanned driving has begun to emerge.
Taking agriculture as an example, a cooperative in Linyi City, Shandong Province has begun to use unmanned tractors for agricultural production.
Unmanned tractors in CCTV news
According to the news, the unmanned tractor used here adopts the Beidou high-precision positioning system independently developed by my country, which not only saves labor costs, but also improves the efficiency and quality of production through automatic driving and big data.
Coincidentally, in some areas of Tacheng, Xinjiang, China Telecom has realized "smart agriculture" through technologies such as big data, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and 5G communications. Unmanned machinery such as unmanned rotary cultivators shined brilliantly in this year's spring plowing process, effectively improving the efficiency of agricultural production.
In the industrial field, there are even more cases of using unmanned driving technology to empower production. In the international logistics park of an automobile company, unmanned logistics fleets have begun to be used for production-related material handling. In the fleet, 3 unmanned tractors replaced the original 6 trucks for logistics operations, greatly reducing production costs.
There are many other similar cases. At the dock of Jifa Company in Rizhao Port, China Telecom's 5G network has begun to empower unmanned driving projects. At present, more than ten unmanned collection trucks have been put into daily transportation work at the terminal. These unmanned collection trucks use China Telecom's 5G network for real-time data transmission, and can realize automatic driving and remote control without a driver.
As we all know, container transportation in large terminals is a difficult and dangerous job. The use of unmanned trucks, on the one hand, can save a lot of costs, and on the other hand, it also reduces the possibility of safety problems.
In addition to unmanned transportation in industrial bases and ports, unmanned vehicles have begun to take on important responsibilities in scenarios such as mining areas and big data centers.
Baosteel Resources Masteel Mining Nanshan Mine currently uses 5G unmanned mine vehicles in the open pit , which is also a case of China Telecom using 5G technology to empower mining production.
Not only in the field of industrial production, China Telecom is using its own technological advantages to put unmanned driving technology into production. In the consumer market, China Telecom is also using its own technical strength to promote the development of unmanned driving technology through cooperation with other companies. A recent case is China Telecom, ZTE, and Baidu completed the first domestic 5G network live driverless car test in Xiong'an New Area, Hebei.
The main purpose of this test is to verify the 5G transmission technology solution for dynamic incremental data of 3D high-precision maps.
It sounds like this sentence is a bit difficult to understand, but as long as it is briefly explained, it should be very easy for friends to understand. As the editor mentioned above, it is very difficult to achieve high-level unmanned driving on open roads, but at present, the industry has already had relatively mature ideas. In the conception, it is an effective solution to realize the data transmission between the vehicle and the cloud, and between the vehicle and the vehicle.
For example, the current navigation application predicts road conditions and traffic lights in a relatively primitive way, but if the traffic congestion and traffic light conditions collected by vehicle sensors on the road are uploaded to the cloud for calculation, the accuracy of road condition predictions and traffic light predictions will increase. Greatly improved, which is also very helpful for automatic driving.
Through this test, we can grasp the situation of data transmission between car to cloud and car to car in the scene of high-speed driving on open roads, and provide assistance for subsequent technological development.
In addition to this test, China Telecom is also building projects such as "smart roads" and "5G unmanned parking areas" in Beijing. In the future, improving the navigation experience through the cloud will become a common scene in our lives, and people's travel efficiency and safety will also be greatly improved.
Unmanned driving will bring people a better travel experience in the future. At present, high-level unmanned driving on open roads cannot really be implemented. However, from the above, it is not difficult to find that in relatively closed production scenarios such as agriculture and industry, unmanned driving has become an effective way to improve production efficiency and reduce production costs.
Perhaps, these scenarios will be the first stop for the popularization of unmanned driving, which can also bring more convenience to our lives.