Airport Self-Driving Operations Surpass 1.6 Million Kilometers: Jiading Company Sets New Domestic Civil Aviation Commercial Benchmark

Deep News
1 hour ago

A milestone has been reached in autonomous driving as UISEE's L4-level self-driving fleet at Urumqi Tianshan International Airport has now accumulated over 1.6 million kilometers of operational mileage. This achievement marks a new record for scaled commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles in civil aviation airport scenarios within China. As a homegrown tech innovator rooted in Luotang Town, Jiading District, this landmark result serves as a vivid example of the town's development pathway centered on "new quality growth, industry-city symbiosis."

UISEE stands as a leading provider of L4-level full-scenario autonomous driving solutions in China, dedicated to the R&D and commercial application of unmanned driving technology for logistics, operations, and mobility vehicles across both open and closed environments. The company represents a key sci-tech entity in Luotang Town's efforts to deepen its intelligent connected vehicle industry track and cultivate new quality productive forces. Civil aviation airports rank among the most safety-demanding industries worldwide, where ramp operations leave virtually zero margin for error. Wu Gansha, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of UISEE, said, "At airports, a safety score of 99.9 equals zero." It is precisely within this zero-tolerance operational environment that UISEE's unmanned fleet has achieved continuous and stable performance, delivering a hard-hitting track record of zero primary responsibility accidents across 1.6 million kilometers of real-world operational data. Currently, this fleet deployed at Urumqi Tianshan International Airport constitutes the largest unmanned ramp fleet in mainland China, with nearly one hundred autonomous vehicles handling over 90% of the airport's cargo and mail transfer tasks. The fleet roster covers two vehicle types: autonomous tow tractors and autonomous shuttle buses, operating around the clock seamlessly between the apron, cargo terminals, and passenger terminals. As of now, UISEE's cumulative fully unattended autonomous driving mileage across all partner airports both domestically and internationally has surpassed 6 million kilometers without a single primary responsibility safety incident.

Urumqi, situated in China's northwestern interior, experiences long, harsh winters with extreme low temperatures reaching -25°C, heavy snow and ice accumulation, and low visibility conditions year-round, presenting formidable challenges for the environmental adaptability of autonomous driving systems. Recalling the project's history, Wu Gansha noted that the first major technical hurdle encountered at project launch in 2020 involved snowfall scenarios: snowflakes striking the surface of LiDAR sensors generated substantial noise, causing the algorithms to "perceive the scene as if filled with hidden projectiles," severely degrading recognition accuracy. More challenging still was the fact that these extreme heavy-snow conditions offered only a single complete data collection window annually; missing it meant waiting another full year, forcing the R&D team to complete all data calibration and algorithm iteration within that window period. The core enabling the fleet's long-term stable operation under such extreme conditions is UISEE's fully self-developed U-Drive® full-scenario autonomous driving operating system. This system incorporates a seven-layer progressive safety architecture: the foundational safety mechanism monitors tens of thousands of state transitions across hundreds of vehicle operational parameters in real time, ensuring anomalies are detected immediately and safety termination actions triggered; the system embeds at least six mutually redundant positioning mechanisms, so failure of any single sensor will not compromise precise vehicle localization; upper layers leverage the industry's largest airport-specific scenario database, with algorithmic systems evolving progressively from traditional rule-driven approaches to dual-driver models combining large language models and world models, enabling full-scenario intelligent decision-making. Behind this 1.6-million-kilometer operational record lies nearly a decade of R&D investment exceeding 1 billion yuan, rapid iteration across more than one hundred software versions over the past three years, and long-term accumulation of tens of millions of kilometers of real-scenario driving data. Currently, UISEE is also pioneering an innovative "AI driver subscription service" business model within the industry, charging clients based on actual operational mileage or usage hours, thereby dismantling the heavy-asset investment barriers traditionally associated with autonomous driving technology deployment. Wu Gansha predicts that by 2030, the global autonomous driving market will reach trillion-yuan scale, with "AI drivers" capable of round-the-clock uninterrupted operations essentially providing a brand-new factor of production for the global real economy. "A century ago, Chinese laborers went abroad under hardship exporting old labor; today, China exports unmanned vehicles and robots that are fundamentally not hardware products but new labor," he said. In his view, the value of AI drivers extends far beyond technology deployment itself, injecting fresh momentum into efficiency upgrades across the global real economy. As a tech enterprise based in Luotang Town, UISEE's technological breakthroughs and commercial successes also epitomize how the town, leveraging its solid industrial foundation, cultivates new quality productive forces. Looking ahead, Luotang Town will continue to optimize its dual-empowerment development framework of "industry upgrading, services deepening," providing full-chain, precision support for tech enterprises in its jurisdiction to propel more hardcore innovators like UISEE into an industrial acceleration lane atop this six-hundred-year-old historic town.

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