The advancement of technology and the need for industrial change have promoted the wide application of robotics in all walks of life, while creating huge business opportunities. As an important form of mobile robot application, unmanned driving has continued to attract capital and talents in recent years, and after more than 10 years of continuous exploration, its application scenarios are becoming more and more differentiated, and the industrial path is becoming clearer and clearer.
At home and abroad, in the past 20 years, huge resources have been invested in the exploration of unmanned driving commercialization, and the important task of L4 commercialization has first fallen to relatively closed production and logistics scenarios such as mines, ports, and factories, which is also considered to be the first unmanned driving application scenario that can realize commercial closed-loop. Among them, based on the basic position in economic development, the authenticity and urgency of demand, and the volume of market value, the urgency and feasibility of unmanned operation of open-pit mines are particularly prominent. Superimposed "green mines", "smart mines", and unmanned intelligent mining represented by open-pit coal mines have risen to a national strategy, and the unmanned commercial closed loop of mines is accelerating.
Based on years of technology accumulation and practical experience, the future-oriented intelligent robot technology company, Mengshi Technology, has been at the forefront of the industry. In the past five years, the Mengshi Technology team has gone deep into the mine site, polished the technology and operation system, continuously improved the comprehensiveness and maturity of the technology and product matrix covering the mine production control process, insisted on creating value for customers, and is ushering in a period of rapid development.
There is an urgent need for the upgrading of the open-pit mine industry, and the path of low-carbon intelligent development is clear
As an important source of economic and social development, mineral resources have created huge wealth in the past 40 years after the reform and opening up, but also faced more and more challenges with the passage of time and the new situation and changes in China's national economy. Over the years, national ministries and commissions, provinces and cities have intensively issued a series of relevant policies and action plans, which shows that the urgency of transforming and upgrading the operation mode of traditional mines is increasing day by day.
At present, China is constantly deepening economic transformation and upgrading, and at the first economic work conference held at the end of 23 years, based on the new situation and new challenges of the new era, it was proposed that "we must adhere to high-quality development as the last word in the new era", which provides a fundamental follow and action guide for future economic work. Under such a general situation, all fields of industrial production will usher in a new round of "industrial revolution". Promote industrial innovation with scientific and technological innovation, integrate high-tech with traditional technology, equipment and management, and realize industrial transformation and upgrading as the main development trend in the future. The State Mine Safety Supervision Bureau also pointed out: "It is necessary to accelerate the upgrading and transformation of mining enterprises, put an end to low-level duplicate construction of backward production capacity, eliminate and exit backward production capacity, and effectively improve the level of mine mechanization, automation and intelligence." Accelerating the development of intelligent mine construction has become the only way for the transformation and high-quality development of mining enterprises.
For a long time, the complex environmental conditions of mines, the high incidence of safety accidents, high energy consumption, and high carbon emissions have been the chronic diseases of the industry.
In terms of mine safety, open-pit mines are prone to mechanical injuries, blasting accidents, electrical accidents, landslides, fires and other accidents due to poor operating conditions, intensive equipment and many on-site change factors. In 2022, there were 367 accidents and 518 deaths in mines across the country. In February 2023, a mining disaster occurred in Alxa, Inner Mongolia, and a landslide accident caused 53 people to be killed, with huge losses and extended impacts, and dozens of people in charge of relevant industries were held accountable and punished.
In terms of carbon emissions, recently, the "Air Quality Continuous Improvement Action Plan" was released, as the third air pollution prevention and control action plan at the national level, which focuses on the optimization of high energy-consuming industries, energy and transportation structure, and especially emphasizes the need to promote the comprehensive improvement of the mine ecological environment.
The current situation of human resources in China's mining industry is also facing many challenges. The talent structure is unreasonable, the brain drain is serious, and there is a shortage of high-skilled talents; The age structure is unreasonable, the average age of drivers in open-pit mines is over 50 years old, and the age structure of employees tends to age. These two problems are accompanied by increasing labor costs, many employment options, and low willingness to work. In the past five years, the salary of mine drivers has been nearly 50%, despite this, it is still facing a continuous shortage of manpower, and it is not alarmist that there will be no successor in the future.
Under the new situation, in order to promote the improvement of mine production mode, the national and local governments have introduced various policies to comprehensively guide and encourage the open-pit mining industry to promote the application of intelligent and unmanned technology. In 2020, the "Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Intelligent Development of Coal Mines" was issued, requiring that by 2025, large-scale coal mines and coal mines with serious disasters should be basically intelligent, and open-pit coal mines should realize intelligent continuous operation and unmanned transportation.
For example, in June 2020, Inner Mongolia issued the "Implementation Opinions on Accelerating the Intelligent Construction of Coal Mines in the Region"; In July 2023, Xinjiang issued the Three-Year Action Plan for the Intelligent Construction of Coal Mines in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region; In September of the same year, the Office of the Central Committee and the Office of the State Council also issued the "Opinions on Further Strengthening the Work of Mine Safety Production", which further clarified the state's intelligent technical support for mechanized substitution, automation reduction, and intelligent unmanned "green mines". It is not difficult to find that whether it is the demand for green ecology, or the pain point needs such as improving safety, solving labor shortages, reducing costs and increasing efficiency, or in the face of the intensified competition in the industry, as well as the trend of high-quality development of the industry, the reform of the traditional production model is imminent.
In fact, the market has seen the feasibility of unmanned driving technology in mining areas, and small start-ups and large national levels are actively promoting the development and application of this field. Just like mushrooms after a rain, intelligent application projects represented by unmanned transportation have been implemented and promoted in open-pit mines in recent years, and the trend of industry change has been formed.
Follow the industry trend and help the "acceleration" of green and smart development
With the clear trend of the industry, a huge blue ocean market has emerged. At present, smart mines are not only recognized as the "new blue ocean" for the digital transformation of the coal mining industry, but also the 100 billion track under the intelligent transformation of automobiles. According to the data given by Qiu Changwu, founder & CEO of Mengzhi Technology,At present, there are more than 40,000 mines of various types in China, of which about 6,000 are open-pit mines.
The annual mining and stripping of earthwork in the open-pit mine can reach about 100 billion tons, and more than 400,000 units of operating equipment work in these scenarios, and the annual excavation and transportation expenditure is about 400 billion. Through the application of autonomous driving technology, profit margins can be increased by 15% to 20% on the basis of the traditional production and operation model, which is a very attractive market. Qiu Changwu said.
The "2023-2028 China Smart Mining Industry Development Status Analysis and Investment Prospect Research Report" of the China Research Institute of Puhua Industry also shows that at present, intelligent coal mining is still in the demonstration stage, which is suitable for working faces with better conditions, and with the improvement of technical levelIn the next 10-20 years, it may be widely used. In the future, the market size will be 2000-800 billion, and the market of hundreds of billions of smart mines will gradually set sail.
In line with the original intention of "helping human life better with intelligent robot technology", Mengzhi Technology hopes to free people from dangerous and tiring scenes through robot technology. As one of the leading companies in China to overcome the unmanned system solutions for open-pit mine scenarios, based on the precipitation of rich industrial control and mobile robot related technologies, after the early development and promotion of autonomous driving in production and logistics scenarios, the company's business landing cases and scale have gradually increased since 2022In 2023, the number of orders in hand of Mengzhi Technology will grow rapidly, exceeding 800 million yuan, and the company's development will enter a new stage.
In 2023, in the direction of open-pit mines, the scale of unmanned deployment will begin to expand, and the development of the industry will enter a new stage simultaneously. In this year, the first unmanned pure electric mining truck project in Guangxi built by Mengzhi was officially put into operation, realizing the comprehensive unmanned and green transportation operations in the mining area. The project adopts a 100-ton pure electric mining truck, which has the characteristics of new energy, large tonnage, and intelligent unmannedUnmanned operation for half a year, transportation mileage of nearly 100,000 kilometers, operation volume of nearly 3 million tonsThe official operation of this project also marks another important step in the development of Guangxi's green circular economy.
Figure |The first unmanned pure electric mining truck project in Guangxi.
Also in this year, in the former hometown of Loulan, Mengzhi Technology, together with the domestic lithium giant, Zhicun Lithium Group, built the industry's first all-mine intelligent green mine in Ruoqiang. This is also the industry's first overall mine intelligent management and control system that comprehensively covers the whole process of mining, transportation and selection with "intelligence, green, and integration" as the core.
Ruoqiang Zhicun lithium mine has an unmanned operation distance of up to 30 kilometers, which is the application project with the longest transportation distance of L4 autonomous driving in domestic mining areasIn the vast Gobi, pure electric unmanned vehicles with green bodies gallop back and forth, becoming a pearl dotted in the vast desert and thousands of miles of Gobi, setting a model for the high-quality development of the regional economy.
On the basis of Zhicun Group's comprehensive investigation and understanding of Mengzhi's technical strength and product system, the two sides put forward the informatization and intelligent requirements for realizing comprehensive control of the production process for its mining and post-processing systems distributed in many places in Xinjiang. Based on the company's own solution system and user needs, it first designed an automatic data acquisition system for the whole process of Xinjiang Zhicun lithium carbonate production line, and then customized and developed a modular and replicable production process monitoring and management systemThe system comprehensively covers the whole process of "mining, transportation, selection and finishing" of Xinjiang Zhicun, realizes real-time information collection and rapid response of production control, and provides good support for Zhicun to improve management informatization and lean control.
Figure |Mengzhi Technology Ruoqiang Whole Mine Intelligent Green Mine.
Pragmatic innovation creates a "smart" change in the mine
With the support of policies and the improvement of the industry situation, Mengshi Technology has invested in the field of technology research and development and technological innovation for many years, building the core software and hardware control system technology and product advantages of autonomous driving, and providing users with a complete set of solutions and operation services.
The "cloud, edge, and end" unmanned transportation system solution independently developed by Mengshi Technology fully considers the characteristics and requirements of the operation scenario, and is composed of a vehicle-side unmanned driving system, a multilaterally distributed centralized control production scheduling platform, and a cloud operation and maintenance support system deployed by the public cloud. The solution has extremely high deployment efficiency, service efficiency and low operation and maintenance costs, and its performance and reliability have been fully verified through long-term operation in many scenarios such as mining areas, ports, and fields, and has the characteristics of high security, strong versatility between scenarios and platforms, high operation efficiency, and fast service responseIt can reduce manpower by 80%, improve efficiency by 15%, and extend working hours by more than 10%.
Specifically, at the security level, the system fully applies redundant safety design in hardware and software design to achieve multiple safety control to ensure any single point of failure, and the system function can be degraded but not out of control, so as to fully ensure the stability and security of the system; In terms of scenario and platform versatility, the system software and hardware adopt hierarchical and modular design, which can be flexibly adapted to the specific needs of each customer scenario and various vehicle platforms to achieve flexible customization and rapid deployment.
In terms of operation efficiency, the system operation process is divided into task levels and sequence operation units, which are comprehensively optimized at different levels to reduce time consumption and achieve the optimal overall operation efficiency. At the level of service response, from the beginning of the system design, we fully consider how to efficiently provide services and technical support for customer groups and production sites, so as to realize the efficient service of the whole life cycle of the solution system.
Based on the full-stack technology layout strategy of software and hardware, Mengshi Technology has developed core software and hardware key technologies including modular environment perception system, high-precision full-condition positioning system, high-performance decision controller, vehicle domain controller, vehicle wire control platform, intelligent vehicle connection solution, cloud service platform, and advanced system.
The mass-produced high-end intelligent driving domain control solution, including the HPU and ADU domain controller, can cover the functional requirements of the intelligent driving domain and chassis domain, and has passed the rigorous automotive-grade product verification and testing. For the multi-sensor fusion of autonomous driving, the domain control solution is equipped with up to 10 Gigabit Ethernet and automotive Ethernet interfaces, 8 serial camera interfaces, 10 CAN interfaces, 2 LIN interfaces and 16 GPIOs, which meet the combined input and output requirements of sensors such as lidar, high-precision inertial navigation, vehicle-grade cameras, millimeter waves, ultrasonics, etc., and can be flexibly adapted to the access of various vehicle chassis and after-installed equipment.
Figure |Mengzhi Technology Autonomous Driving Controller & Perception Decision-making Computing Unit.
In Qiu Changwu's view, "the unmanned operation system is only a subsystem with the highest technical barriers in the intelligent mine system, and it is the most challenging link in the construction of smart mines, and the intelligent control of the mine as a whole means that it is necessary to realize all the production factors in the mining area, as well as the comprehensive informatization and intelligence of the environmental monitoring, production activities and management processes in the mining area, and the application of automatic driving technology is the inevitable choice for the automation and intelligence of the on-site production process." ”
What is a smart mine? Wisdom means that people can independently absorb knowledge and experience, understand the people, things and things around us, and think, analyze, make decisions and execute independently. For mines, their intelligence also needs to be able to realize autonomous perception, analysis, decision-making and control. The construction of smart mines is not a simple accumulation of technologies such as unmanned driving, Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence, etc., but needs to build a closed loop of data logic and application processing, facing the needs of mine management and production, achieving automation and intelligent processing capabilities, reducing human intervention and optimizing process control.
As the most representative and complex operation subsystem in the intelligent management and control system of open-pit mines, the unmanned transportation operation system needs to be fully integrated into the information management platform of the whole process of mining, mineral processing, transportation, warehousing, safety and management, so as to realize the digitalization, informatization and automation of all aspects of mine control operations, and then realize intelligence. Traditional mines lack effective technical means to achieve automatic management and control in the mining and transportation links that are intensive in manpower and equipment, and intelligent operations cannot be implemented, becoming a blind spot for digital and intelligent mines. The application of unmanned driving technology as the core intelligent operating system can make up for this deficiency and provide technical means for the comprehensive digitalization and automation of the mine production process.
Figure |Multi-system integration and deployment of Mengzhi Technology.
In the process of cooperation with Zhicun Lithium Group in the Ruoqiang project in Xinjiang, Mengshi Technology has built an overall production process information control system covering mining areas, unmanned transportation, concentrators and refineries in response to the customer's needs for the informatization of all factors in the production process and the integration of the production process control system. The integrated platform system realizes the informatization of all vehicles, equipment, raw material consumption, finished products, production line production process, equipment maintenance, quality control and other elements involved in production, and has become the "intelligent operation center" of the mine, which can effectively monitor mine production activities, schedule and control various equipment, integrate various production factors, and quickly summarize supply, production and demand data, laying a good foundation for the subsequent production process intelligence and lean improvement.
Figure |Mengzhi Technology and the overall production process information management and control system of the mining area.
In this project, the unmanned transportation operation link realizes the automatic transportation of ore from the mining area to the concentrator, which actually becomes the automatic means of raw material transportation in the production line of the concentrator. In order to achieve stable material supply and ensure the continuous production of downstream production lines, the unmanned transportation operation system continuously monitors and controls the transportation volume and transportation speed to achieve the stability of raw materials and ores. Based on the information connection between the unmanned operation system and the back-end production line, it can realize the active monitoring and scheduling of the vehicle transportation process based on the requirements of the production task, and respond to the production cycle requirements of the downstream production line.
Through the application of this system, the management of Zhicun Group can fully grasp the overall operation, consumption and output of the production process in Ruoqiang mining area through mobile phones and other terminals anytime and anywhere, and respond quickly and accurately based on market demand and fluctuation, so as to achieve market-oriented agile response and lean control of the production process, and provide strong support for reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
Acting as enterprising,The scale of revenue has increased exponentially
Qiu Changwu pointed out in an interview with Gaishi:"As a technology company, blindly immersed in technology development, can not meet the development needs, must combine market demand, through products to create value for customers, to obtain returns. Core technology & product research and development, engineering solutions and service delivery capabilities must become the company's feet, striding forward with development. Based on the 'bipedal' development strategy, we will coordinate the development of the company's business, incubate the dual base points of the R&D center and the engineering center, and then form an operation mode of continuous innovation and benign development, and promote the sustainable development of the company's business. ”
With the support of the "two-legged" strategy, from Anhui, Guangxi, Shandong to Xinjiang, one benchmark case after another has been put into operation, and the business territory of the alliance has been continuously expanded; From software to hardware to complete sets of intelligent mine construction solutions, Mengzhi's user-centered technology ecosystem continues to expand. Practice has proved that the business model chosen by Mengzhi is stable and sustainable, and has achieved a benign business closed loop, and has successively reached close cooperation with industry giants such as Shandong Heavy Industry Group, Weichai Group, China National Building Materials, Shandong Port Group, China North Industries, Shandong Pengxiang, and Zhicun Lithium.
In the past 2023, Mengzhi's revenue has doubled, and based on the current projects in hand, Mengzhi's revenue scale in 2024 is expected to achieve several times**, and it has the opportunity to achieve annual profitability in 24 years, becoming the first mining unmanned technology company to achieve profitability in the industry. In the face of the evolution trend of high-quality development of the industry and the continuous wave of intelligent robots to promote social development in the future, Mengshi Technology adheres to the spirit of responsibility and enterprising, deeply cultivates the field of smart mining with pragmatic and innovative technologies and products, and continues to create value for customers and society.