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Delivering fruits from the orchard to the airport in 7 minutes, solving the "urgent, difficult, dangerous, and roundabout" problems of land transportation... The success of the first coordinated transportation of 21 drones in the country has increased the efficiency of logistics delivery by 17 times and expanded the application scenarios of domestic low-altitude logistics. For the main research and development team of drone technology, United Aircraft Group (hereinafter referred to as "United Aircraft"), from laboratories in Beijing, Shenzhen and other places to the crisp plum orchard at the foot of Wushan Mountain in Chongqing, the secret of success is not only more than ten years of technical accumulation, but also the courage of the research and development team to try and innovate in the absence of precedents. On July 31, a reporter from Beijing Business Daily interviewed United Aircraft to reveal how 21 drones can achieve coordinated transportation, and how low-altitude enterprises should seize favorable policies to promote the development of Beijing's low-altitude economy.

Nearly 2 hours shortened to 7 minutes

On July 2, as the Wushan plum orchard opened, 21 drones took off, carrying plump and juicy plums to Chongqing Wushan Airport. In just half a day, these freshly picked plums can reach supermarket shelves in Nanjing, Shanghai and other places from the orchards in Chongqing Wushan, and be delivered to consumers.

The air transportation of Wushan crisp plums was the first time in the country that 21 drones were used for coordinated transportation, using one TD550 coaxial unmanned helicopter and 20 Q20 quad-rotor flying platforms developed by United Aircraft Corporation.

Xiang Zitao, director of the United Aircraft Low-Altitude Economic Research Institute, introduced that low-altitude logistics and distribution is an important application direction in the low-altitude industry, including drone delivery of takeout, intra-city express delivery, feeder logistics, etc. Different from single drone delivery, the key to collaborative transportation lies in "collaboration", that is, the coordination of drones of different sizes and configurations, as well as the coordination of manned and drones.

In the latter collaborative mode, manned aircraft are mainly responsible for trunk and some branch line transportation, while different models of drones are responsible for branch and terminal logistics transportation, thereby meeting the timeliness requirements of logistics transportation - this is the unique advantage of the low-altitude collaborative transportation mode.

Xiang Zitao said that the efficiency of low-altitude collaborative transportation in the four scenarios of "urgent, difficult, dangerous and roundabout" has been significantly improved.

In the past, the postal car had to drive from the orchard at an altitude of 200-300 meters at the foot of the mountain to Wushan Airport at an altitude of 1,700 meters. Although the straight-line distance is only 3-4 kilometers, it takes nearly 2 hours to drive. As the altitude rises, the weather on the 30-kilometer winding mountain road is changeable, and heavy rains in summer lead to frequent geological disasters such as mudslides and landslides. At the same time, the top of the mountain is shrouded in clouds and mist, and the visibility is relatively low.

The coordinated transportation of drones can effectively solve the problems faced by land transportation. Data provided by United Aircraft shows that the coordinated transportation of drones can shorten the nearly 2 hours of land transportation to 7 minutes, and the transfer efficiency has increased by 86.7%.

Not only that, drone collaborative transportation also makes it possible for agricultural products to fly directly from major producing towns and villages to Wushan Airport.

Xiang Zitao said that previously, it took nine hours to transport the plums from the orchard to Jiangbei International Airport, and it took even longer to transport them to more than a thousand cities across the country. Now, after the drone arrives at Wushan Airport and is connected, the plums will be rushed to the Wushan-Nanjing Postal Airlines flight and delivered to customers across the country.

"The overall transportation efficiency has increased 17 times," said Xiang Zitao.

"Two-way rush" of technology and scenarios

In fact, although the location of this coordinated transport mission is Wushan, Xiang Zitao said that most of the R&D team of United Aircraft is located in Beijing. From the Beijing base of United Aircraft to the application scenarios across the country, Xiang Zitao said that this is a "two-way rush" of technology and scenarios again and again.

In recent years, my country's drone logistics and transportation market has undergone significant changes. According to the Shenzhen Drone Industry Association, by 2024, the domestic drone market will reach 160 billion yuan, of which the drone market for express logistics will be about 30 billion yuan. The latest data from the Civil Aviation Administration of China also shows that in the first half of 2024, the cumulative flight hours of drones reached 9.816 million hours, an increase of 134,000 hours year-on-year.

Under this booming development trend, new demands such as instant delivery, delivery to remote areas, and delivery of special items continue to emerge, and new scenarios such as urban business district and community delivery, cross-city express delivery and cross-sea feeder transportation, agriculture and emergency rescue are also gradually expanding.

For low-altitude enterprises, on the one hand, they need to match existing advanced technologies with new scenarios, and on the other hand, they also need to update technologies based on new scenarios.

Xiang Zitao revealed that in order to successfully carry out the coordinated transportation mission of the crisp plums, he and his team also iterated various technologies.

On the platform side, collaborative transportation scenarios require a "steward" to assign tasks, make decisions, generate trajectory planning, and monitor flight status in real time. Xiang Zitao introduced that the intelligent airspace command and control system developed by the United Aircraft plays this role.

However, the research and development journey of "Butler" was not all smooth sailing.

According to Xiang Zitao's recollection, in the process of developing and iterating the intelligent airspace command and control system, drone operations tended to develop in a high-density manner. Accordingly, the intelligent airspace command and control system also needed to control the distance between drone flights. However, in actual applications, there is basically no precedent for high-density drone flights.

What is the safe distance between aircraft during high-density flights? How to set the time for batch takeoff to maximize efficiency? These questions are troubling Xiang Zitao and his team.

"The final parameters were tested bit by bit by our team." According to Xiang Zitao's description, R&D personnel from three departments cooperated with each other during the test. The hardware department installed sensor equipment and transponders on the drone, and the software department adjusted the algorithm for the system. Once the hardware and software were in place, the flight test department would deliberately look for actual flight test scenarios and deliberately create collision crises in order to test the system's ultimate capabilities.

“When several drones are too close to each other, colleagues from the three departments will be frightened and break out in cold sweats. Although anti-collision measures have been taken in advance, every test is still thrilling,” said Xiang Zitao.

When a new product needs to be tested or a major version of the product is updated, R&D personnel need to rush from the R&D base in Beijing to the test site to directly witness the test process and intervene in adjustments. Xiang Zitao told the Beijing Business Daily reporter that some colleagues involved in the testing of key models even have to be stationed abroad for most of the year.

"With the increase in the number of tests, we have accumulated a lot of test data. We are now building a simulation test model based on this data, and the efficiency of the test has also been greatly improved." Xiang Zitao said that as a R&D personnel, the most simple wish is to make the technology better. "Even if there is no precedent to refer to, we can achieve independent research and development after repeated attempts. This shows our R&D personnel's love and persistence in the industry."

Cooperate with universities to attract talents

Regarding how companies balance revenue and cost investment, Xiang Zitao frankly admitted that in the early and middle stages of industry development, companies may face situations where investment exceeds revenue.

For drone logistics and delivery, if the transportation volume is insufficient, it is difficult for the company to maintain profitability by relying solely on logistics and transportation. However, Xiang Zitao also said that the domestic low-altitude market has great development potential. From the perspective of the company's operations, continued investment in logistics and transportation is still very beneficial to the development of United Aircraft.

At the same time, in addition to logistics and transportation, Xiang Zitao said that United Aircraft is also continuing to operate other core businesses, and the overall business development is relatively stable.

Since the beginning of this year, Beijing and its districts have issued favorable policies for the low-altitude economy.

In May, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology issued the "Beijing Action Plan to Promote the High-Quality Development of Low-Altitude Economy Industry (2024-2027) (Draft for Comments)", proposing that Beijing will strive to exceed 5,000 low-altitude economy-related enterprises within three years. In the same month, Fengtai District of Beijing announced that it would strive to form 1-2 mature, stable, safe, reliable and efficient low-altitude command and dispatch systems within one year. Fangshan District of Beijing also stated that it would strive to build a "main-trunk-branch" take-off and landing point network within three years by laying out a low-altitude supervision system and building an industrial park featuring low-altitude intelligent manufacturing, creating multiple scenarios such as emergency rescue and material delivery.

Sun Liye, vice president of United Aircraft and general manager of Beijing Base, believes that the UAV industry, as a technology-oriented industry, has a great demand for high-end talents. Beijing has a strong foundation of science and technology and talents, with numerous universities and research institutes, providing rich talent resources for low-altitude economic industries such as UAVs. "At present, United Aircraft is carrying out industry-university-research cooperation with Tsinghua University, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beijing Institute of Technology and other universities to jointly tackle technical issues. At the same time, it is absorbing reserve R&D talents from universities and working closely with upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain."

In addition, Sun Liye said that United Aircraft has also launched drone applications in Beijing. For example, during the flood prevention and rescue operations in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei last summer, drone rescue teams were dispatched to Mentougou and other places to carry out emergency material delivery and communication relay tasks.

Jin Wei, deputy secretary general of the China UAV Industry Innovation Alliance, said that Beijing's sound economic capital structure is conducive to the formation of a low-altitude economic industry cluster, and the low-altitude flight market has considerable development potential. Under favorable policies, if the logistics distribution, manned air transportation and other fields of the low-altitude economy can achieve normalized operations in the future, each field may be able to leverage a trillion-level market.

Beijing Business Daily reporter Guan Zichen Niu Qingyan