In the future, the industrial scene represented by mines is becoming a pioneer in the popularization of driverless technology.
How far are we from driverless in the true sense?
In 2013, the U.S. Highway Traffic Safety Commission proposed a classification standard for autonomous driving technology, which classifies autonomous vehicle into five grades L1-L5 according to different autonomous driving capabilities. In L1-L3 stage, the car can realize limited auxiliary driving; In the L4-L5 stage, the car can realize the real sense of automatic driving, that is, driverless.
At present, the autonomous driving technology of most mass-produced vehicles with "autonomous driving ability" is still in the L2-L3 stage. The true sense of driverless, seems to be still far away. As John Krafcik, CEO of waymo, an autonomous driving enterprise, said, "it is more difficult to put a truly driverless car on the road than a rocket."
However, if we look beyond the open road, we will find that driverless has achieved or begun a substantial commercialization in some scenes, such as the low-speed express logistics car common in science and technology parks, and the mine driverless in closed scenes.
A few days ago, tage Zhixing, a mine driverless head enterprise, announced that it has been the first to realize the 24-hour "normalized de safety officer operation" of mine trucks / mining wide body vehicles in many open-pit coal mines under the national energy and national power investment corporation and Yongshun coal mine in Ordos. In the future, the industrial scene represented by mines is becoming a pioneer in the popularization of driverless technology.
When driverless "enter" the mine
Why can mines become the field of driverless rapid commercial landing?
Compared with urban roads, the mine environment is closed, the roads and traffic rules are self-contained, there is no traffic law problem of open roads, and the vehicle route is relatively fixed, and the speed is mostly below 40km / h; In addition, mine driverless has clear and controllable operation rules and guidelines, and the business model is also clearer. These reasons make the mine an excellent scene for the commercialization of driverless vehicles. According to the above description of the normalized "safety officer removal" operation by tage Zhixing, the company's unmanned driving scheme in the mining area has basically achieved the commercialization of L4 level unmanned driving in the mining area.
In open-pit mining, the tramcar transportation operation involves the "loading transportation unloading" operation process, which is one of the core links of open-pit operation. The proportion of transportation costs (vehicles, fuel, maintenance, driver wages) in the production and operation costs of open-pit coal mines can often reach more than 50%. Among them, the driver's salary is the largest part of the transportation cost. The mine will not be shut down for 24 hours, and a mine car will be equipped with 5-8 drivers to work and rest alternately in the mode of three shifts. The working environment in the mine is poor, and the income of mine car drivers is about 8000-12000 yuan per month. Considering insurance, accommodation and other expenses, the comprehensive cost of hiring a driver in the mine is about 150000-200000 yuan / year. This means that the labor cost of a mining car alone may exceed one million yuan a year.
At the same time, statistics show that more than 90% of major safety accidents in open-pit mines also occur in the transportation sector, and once these major safety accidents occur, the economic losses will be tens of millions or even hundreds of millions. Therefore, if the safety problems in transportation are solved, most of the major potential safety hazards will be solved.
Based on safety and cost considerations, mining enterprises have the incentive to promote the commercialization of driverless vehicles. Similarly, focusing on the dual goals of safe production and economic benefits, the national policy is also actively promoting the driverless transformation of open-pit mines. For example, the guiding opinions on accelerating the intelligent development of coal mines issued by eight ministries and commissions including the national development and Reform Commission, the energy administration, the Ministry of industry and information technology, and the coal regulatory bureau in March 2020 pointed out that by 2025, open-pit coal mines should realize intelligent continuous operation and unmanned transportation.
Driven by various factors, the mine driverless market is growing rapidly. Nationwide, coal, cement, gravel, metal and other mines have laid out driverless. Many research institutions predict that by 2025, the scale of China's mine driverless market is expected to reach the level of 200-400 billion yuan, which is equivalent to the total annual revenue of global mining giant BHP Billiton.
Tage Zhixing has achieved the practice of "normalized de safety officer" operation in multiple mining areas, achieving L4 level in the mining area environment. The development process and technical realization behind it are of reference significance for the further development of driverless driving in this field and the "de safety officer" of driverless driving in other tracks.
Trilogy of mine driverless "safety officer getting off"
In the early years, during the test phase of the mine driverless project, engineers needed to follow the car to maintain the operation of the driverless system. With the progress of driverless technology, engineers get off and only keep safety officers. Safety officers do not need to understand the principle of driverless driving. Compared with traditional drivers, safety officers only need to intervene in vehicle driving under specific circumstances, and the work intensity is greatly reduced.
In the era of safety officers following cars, the potential of mine driverless has not been fully released, but it can already produce certain economic benefits. After that, the safety officer began to "get out of the cabin", and there was no need to sit in the cockpit and be ready to intervene at any time. The ultimate goal of mine driverless driving is to "let the safety officer get off", that is, the safety officer is no longer required to follow the car, and it is completely left to the mining car to drive independently.
The implementation of the third link is very complex, but it can be simplified to a problem of both "time" and "space". Time dimension, how long does the safety officer get off? An hour, a day, or a month? In terms of space dimension, what scenes and tasks can the vehicle in which the safety officer gets off complete? Is it a customized scene or any operation area in the whole mining area?
Different from the concept of "safety officer getting off the train" often mentioned in the industry at present, tage Zhixing said that the so-called normalized safety officer getting off the train, that is, in addition to the necessary vehicle maintenance and the situation that it is not suitable to carry out production operations according to the production procedures, the safety officer can get off the train 24 hours a day at other times, and the operation content covers the "departure to collection" of the big cycle And the whole process of "loading, transportation and unloading" of small cycle; Rather than for specific purposes other than production operations, the pilot "safety officer alighting" operation with limited work content and lasting for hours to days under specific circumstances.
According to the introduction, tage Zhixing first practiced getting off the train as a safety officer in Bayan Obo iron mine of Baotou Iron and Steel Co. in July 2020. Until March this year, it carried out normalized safety officer getting off the train in many mining areas one by one. In the middle, after 20 months of day and night R & D iterations and on-site practice. While the normalized safety officer getting off the train started in March this year, tage Zhixing also put forward the slogan of "safety officer getting off the train, safety not getting off the train" and made steady progress. The gradual strategy of "getting off in two shifts", to "getting off in three shifts within 24 hours", and then to "getting off in three shifts within 7 * 24 hours" is adopted for the two types of mining trucks and mining wide body vehicles.
In terms of the literal understanding of "unmanned" driving, it can indeed be considered that the normalized "safety officer getting off the train" is a qualitative leap from "manned" to "unmanned". At this time, it can help the mining party realize the real unmanned tramcar and realize the "intrinsic safety" and "efficiency optimization" that the mining area pays attention to.
In the name of "safety officer getting off", the technical layout of tangge Zhixing
At the technical level, compared with driverless passenger cars on open roads, driverless mining areas have their own challenges. On open roads, driverless drivers have to face the complex environment of people, vehicles and obstacles, complex traffic rules (traffic signs, signal lights, etc.), speeds up to 120km/ h, and ensure the safety of all traffic participants.
Open pit mines have to face unstructured roads with almost no traffic signs and frequent changes in roads and transportation work areas; Poor working environment and road conditions, dust, bumps, rolling stones, landslides, ruts, mud boiling and other problems; And various extreme climatic and geological conditions such as high temperature, high cold, high altitude, rain and fog; Due to different application scenarios, the consistency of mining trucks will also be relatively weak. The above factors all bring different requirements to the technical selection of mine vehicle driverless system.
However, the achievement of the milestone of "normalized safety officers getting off the train" is certainly not due to the gains and losses of local technology "one city, one place", but a systematic project with historical heritage. Before all the technical implementation details, we must first see the top-level technical layout, and behind the technical layout is the business insight into the focused scenario.
If the passenger car driverless solution enterprise is using the business model of to B, cooperating with upstream and downstream, and finally delivering a 100% standardized commodity to C-end consumers, then the mining area driverless solution enterprise is using the business model of to B, and finally delivering a complete operating system to b-end mining enterprise users. Here are three key questions to answer:
1. Selection of driverless framework system in mining area
There is a route dispute between single vehicle intelligence and vehicle road coordination in driverless passenger cars. What route should driverless drivers take in mining areas? The answer is not so obvious.
According to tage Zhixing, in the early stage of the company's establishment, after a short-term exploration, it quickly focused on the mining area scene. The early field measurement and actual measurement are also single vehicle mode. But after this stage, where is the development direction of the technical solution? This is an area that no one has explored. The experience of passenger cars can be partly used for reference, but cannot be copied.
Thanks to the technical accumulation of the founding team, tage Zhixing proposed a scheme framework for driverless "car ground cloud" collaboration in the mining area. In the view of tage Zhixing, the meaning of this architecture is just like the meaning of the computer architecture defined by von leumann in those years, "five major parts of arithmetic unit, controller, memory, input and output devices and their interrelationships". The technical architecture system in line with the scene supports the subsequent technical layout of tage Zhixing. Now we can see the shadow of this architecture from some other similar schemes, although you may have different degrees of completion and detailed function definitions.
2. Balance productization and project delivery
To B's business, there is no 100% standard. Startups serving the to B industry will always swing and tangle between products and projects. How to make full use of limited resources at different stages of development, give full play to the rapid response of the project system to market demand, and the precipitation advantage of productization, which is conducive to the maturity of the scheme and the improvement of efficiency, and coordinate the relationship between the two, is a very challenging topic for small and medium-sized science and technology enterprises. The answer to this topic will be reflected in the company's organizational structure and resource matching.
Project first is the inevitable choice of early companies. However, according to its own development level, tage Zhixing built an independent product team outside the R & D team very early; Relying on the cooperation with Beihang, the Institute was established to focus on the technology and projects in the early exploration stage; At the same time, a systematic project delivery team was established in early practice. And pay special attention to the reasonable allocation of "it vehicle mine" talents in the above three teams.
The R & D mode of "R & D + product + engineering" enables tage Zhixing to quickly disassemble a big problem into many subsystems and sub products, carry out corresponding tracking, and complete function realization and multi-stage testing through system design, product design and technical design, so as to quickly realize on-site sports car verification. This system can ensure that the company can quickly respond to new needs and challenges.
With the blessing of product thinking and engineering thinking, tage Zhixing has developed a series of special on-board domain controller products for train specification mining areas, which are unique in the industry. At the program level, the tage Zhixing "kuanggu" program has also achieved a high degree of maturity and standardization. The company is able to achieve "normalized safety officers getting off the train operation" in multiple mining areas at almost the same time on two mainstream models of large mining trucks and mining wide body vehicles, which is also a footnote to the degree of productization.
3. Focus on mining areas?
It is reported that at the beginning of its establishment, tage Zhixing had done logistics business in the park and the underlying technology of some passenger cars, and made money. However, in a very short time, tage Zhixing found the treasure scene of the mining area, which was blessed by "just needs and policies". Unexpectedly, the company gave up all other businesses and devoted itself to the mining scene.
This can be said to be a business choice, but it is also a technology choice - the essence is the depth of the industry plan.
Tage Zhixing believes that its competitive advantage fundamentally comes from the accumulation of core algorithms and system solutions formed by long-term deep cultivation in the open-pit field, including perception technology, planning and control technology and cloud control technology. Integrate perception to deal with complex scenes in the mining area, and use planning and control technology to deal with complex and narrow road conditions; Cloud control technology is responsible for overall scheduling; The self-developed domain controller ensures the reliability of the whole system under the harsh working environment in the mining area. The long-term accumulation of software and hardware technology ensures the safety and economy of the system as a whole.
This choice is also reflected in the company's data thinking and closed-loop thinking. Such as vehicle life cycle management, closed-loop implementation of high-precision map, multiple redundancy of safety mechanism and vehicle ground cloud closed-loop. Focusing can make the scheme mature faster, cut deeper into the industry, and also generate more business model imagination space.
Key technology practice of normalized safety officer getting off
The rapid realization of "normalized safety officers getting off the bus" can be said to be a phased achievement of several key top-level technology construction issues such as the "car ground cloud" architecture. In the view of tage Zhixing, the implementation of this achievement depends on the work in the following directions from the perspective of technological realization:
Risk assessment and standard system
It is the customer's need for a normalized safety officer to get off the bus. However, how to make customers have confidence in you and dare to let you do it with confidence is actually the first difficulty for safety officers to get off the car regularly.
At present, mine driverless applications are at L4 level, that is, they are deployed in a specific operational design domain (odd). First of all, tage Zhixing has established an evaluation system for odd from five dimensions: Road, vehicle, environment, management and network. Based on the odd evaluation results, tage Zhixing established a set of risk matrix around the normalization of safety officers getting off the bus, and communicated with customers the acceptable risk items when making innovative attempts. Furthermore, tage Zhixing has formed an evaluation system for safety officers to get off in stages, and its process is divided into multiple stages.
Tage Zhixing said, "interestingly, we must first build confidence in the safety officers." In the early stage of getting off, the first stage is the "simulated safety officer" stage; At this time, the safety officer is on the car, but we need to make him believe in the system. We have to stop taking over manually, so as to eliminate the invalid taking over and ensure the authenticity and accuracy of the data. Subsequently, the length of time for safety officers to get off the train will be gradually extended until 7 * 24 hours of normal operation without safety officers is achieved.
Fusion perception technology
Perception technology is the first barrier of driverless function and safety. In the field of unmanned driving in the mining area, safety and operation continuity come first, and the user cost is not sensitive. Facing its unique working environment, fusion perception has always been the best choice.
The sensing part of tage Zhixing's "kuanggu" scheme adopts multi-source heterogeneous fusion sensing, including millimeter wave radar, laser radar and camera. The total number of sensors deployed in all directions of large mining card is more than 20. For the safety of night operation, tage Zhixing also takes the lead in incorporating infrared sensors into the scheme. Different types of sensors have various sensing advantages. Cross validation of data from different sources ensures the accuracy and reliability of sensing information.
Multiple safety redundancy
Tage Zhixing mentioned that as a guarantee for the stability of the entire driverless system and the normalization of safety officers getting off, they have carried out a large number of redundant designs for the entire system, including the redundant design of the line control system, the heterogeneous redundancy scheme on the driverless main controller, and the deployment of independent redundant modules for each subsystem of driverless. The safety redundancy design in the whole scheme covers hardware, perception, communication and other core links, and adopts double redundancy or even multiple redundancy. In the construction of tage Zhixing scheme, there is also a "virtual security officer" system independent of the system.
As a barrier independent of electronic equipment, Taige Zhixing even installed a "mechanical leg" in the cockpit. In the absence of a safety officer, even if the control system fails, the mechanical leg will act as the last safety barrier to simulate the human leg stepping on the brake pedal to complete emergency braking.
Under the large architecture of "vehicle ground cloud", the vehicle side safety mechanism, cloud side safety mechanism and ground safety mechanism are also redundant relations of mutual backup, rather than just handing over the safety functions to the on-board system.
High precision map
The roads and working areas in the mining area are unstructured earth roads. There are no sign lines and traffic signs on the pavement, and the frequency of road changes is very high. With the advancement of mine production, the loading and unloading points of tramcars and even the landform of the mining area will change; The ladder structure and climate on the road section also have an impact, such as unexpected side landslides, and the sinking of floating soil caused by wind and rain, which will lead to the change of road boundary. In this case, the real-time and high-precision of high-precision map is very important, even higher than the relevant standards on the public road. It can be said that the timeliness and accuracy of the map are the premise of the scene for the safety officer to get off. Therefore, mine driverless service providers must have the ability to quickly build real-time high-precision maps.
In the tage Zhixing scheme, there is a set of independent high-precision map products, which are used to realize the full life cycle management of high-precision maps. The product covers the modules of map material collection, map making, map publishing and map use. The high-precision map product also layered static elements and dynamic elements, and established an independent data format. At present, the company is working with ecological partners to draft relevant standards based on this format. In order to ensure the reliability of high-precision maps, tage Zhixing also adheres to a variety of redundancy concepts. The optical acquisition end includes map acquisition vehicles, driverless mine card task trigger acquisition and other methods.
Special vehicle specification level hardware for mining area
As mentioned above, the working environment in the mining area is very poor, and the consistency of mining vehicles such as wide body vehicles and mining cards will also be relatively weak, which also brings higher requirements to vehicle control. In 2017, after completing the preliminary single vehicle test, tage Zhixing gave up the industrial computer scheme and ordinary on-board controller, and turned to self-developed on-board and controller specially developed for the mining area.
At present, this series of products has developed to the third generation. This series of domain controller products are built based on vehicle specification components and modules. They are not only compatible with various industrial communication and positioning protocols, but also have passed 3C and network access certification, as well as environmental reliability and electrical performance, EMC tests of high and low temperature, vibration, humidity, etc. of China Metrology Institute, and can adapt to the working environment at -50 ~ 85 ℃. From the results, the successful realization of this round of normalized safety officers' getting off operation in multiple mining areas and vehicles is inseparable from the high reliability, high performance and high compatibility of the above exclusive hardware products.
Massive vehicle closed-loop data
The research and development mode of tage Zhixing large-scale system has formed a data closed loop. The company's years of technical accumulation and business practice in the field of intelligent mines have enabled it to accumulate a large number of core data on driverless and mine operations.
These data are also feeding the wisdom of Ta Ge, so that it has enough ability to extract and recognize some data when it needs it, and then solve the problems it faces; So that it can design safer, stable and reliable driverless solutions, and deeply understand the operation mode of smart mines.
Standardized project delivery
A lot of normal safety officers in multiple mining areas go hand in hand to get off the train, which is also a great test not only for products, but also for project delivery.
"Basically, in five to six months, we can make a group run according to the state of normalization to the safety officer. Through the synchronous implementation of multiple projects from the second half of last year to the first half of this year, we have greatly improved in the standardization, sequencing and modularization of project delivery."
Tage Zhixing believes that this time will be further shortened. There are three reasons: first, the products are becoming more and more mature, and the degree of engineering automation is becoming higher and higher, which shortens the time for on-site problem troubleshooting and resolution; At the same time, the requirements of odd domain are getting lower and lower, which is more time-saving. Second, with more and more deployment projects, the workflow of the delivery team has been standardized, and the work content has also been modularized. Third, customers' understanding of driverless driving is becoming more and more accurate, and the continuous successful projects of tage in the past have also enhanced users' confidence. They can more accurately provide support conditions for on-site deployment.
Learn from users
Tage Zhixing introduced that the coal mines that promote the normalization of safety officers to get off include several large state-owned coal mines. The achievement of the goal can be said to be the result of joint promotion by both sides.
"The client side has a special team to work side by side with us. We evaluate the project site together with the client to deeply understand some existing problems and matters that both sides need to cooperate with."
"For some technical difficulties encountered at the project site, the customer will give their past experience, especially in the vehicle control strategy, the customer will give how to do it when driving manually. This is a very valuable experience, which we can translate into the corresponding algorithm."
"On the customer side, we are always students. When automation technology is applied to the industry, in fact, I don't like to use the word 'empowerment'. There is an old saying that every other line is like a mountain. The industry knowledge accumulated by the customer for many years, we can easily say that empowerment is not appropriate in just a few years."
Future technological development goals: ultimate safety and higher efficiency
First of all, the operation design domain (odd) still exists, and the security officer alighting also needs to work within the scope defined by the odd domain. However, at present, most of the real operation scenarios can meet the requirements of the above odd domain, that is, for most mining areas, the security officer alighting can be normalized through necessary deployment. In the future, the requirements of odd domain will be further reduced to achieve simpler deployment and more extreme experience.
The normalized "safety officer getting off" is far from the end of driverless mining. Safety is the first point that customers consider, followed by efficiency, economy and environmental protection. Take efficiency as an example. At present, driverless driving when safety officers get off the bus can reach 80% compared with manual driving, but in the future, this number will definitely need to exceed manual driving. With the accumulation of vehicle life cycle data, reducing fuel consumption, reducing tire damage, and even combining with electrification to achieve higher economic benefits and energy conservation and environmental protection is the meaning of the topic.
Transportation is only one link of mine operation. Driverless is a means rather than an end. Further integration with the mine business, the driverless system can be perfectly integrated into the overall production process, operation process and operation management of the mine, solve its pain points, and bring the improvement of operation management and production operations, so as to help users realize the true sense of unmanned mine and smart mine.
Tage Zhixing has always been the pioneer and explorer of the industry. In the early stage, it was the first to realize the field test and measurement of mine car driverless, the earliest marshalling operation, mixed marshalling operation and night operation, and the earliest to realize the normalization of safety officers getting off the mine. In the future, tage Zhixing will go faster and further on the road of creating a new world in the future.
