Tianjin to fly with low-altitude economy and new quality productivity

Are you ready to dance with an airplane and explore the sky within 3,000 meters? 

As China's important strategic emerging industry, low-altitude economy (or near-space economy) has become a hot spot of attention at the 2024 World Intelligence Expo (WIE), and many enterprises have brought new technologies and new applications to the scene to show the new trend of low-altitude economy development.

A SPECIAL DEVICE CALLED "LOTUS". ZHAO ZISHUO/XIN HUA

Visitors coming to Tianjin exhibition area were all attracted by a“lotus”, a special device with beautiful outlook and an UAV inside that was displayed by i-Kingtec.

According to Ma Hui, vice president of the company, the device named“lotus lamp” is actually a fully automated airport. After the staff issued tasks in the Tiger Vision four-dimensional holographic control platform, the automatic airport can autonomously replace the battery and sensor for the UAV, and the UAV takes off from the airport to perform inspection operations, which can automatically produce inspection reports, greatly improving work efficiency and accuracy.

The design of this automatic airport is very compact. It covers an area of only 0.25 square meters, and its weight is 90 kilograms. It only takes 52 seconds to achieve the automatic replacement of drone batteries and pods. At present, it has been widely used in electric power, new energy, smart city, fire emergency response, smart cultural travel and other industries.

It is understood that all kinds of domestic infrastructure sectors such as electricity, new energy, fire protection, emergency rescue, as well as smart cities, safe cities and smart forestry, smart cultural tourism and other sectors, all need the above mentioned drones for highly frequent and regular patrol.

With the power of large-scale models of artificial intelligence and related industries, the application field of low-altitude economy is expanding rapidly, becoming an important driving force for leading a new model and new business form of economic development.

In recent years, Tianjin has deeply implemented the high-quality development of the manufacturing industry, focused on cultivating the upstream and downstream industrial system of the low-altitude economy, accelerated the promotion of supporting and chain groups, with hundreds of low-altitude industry-related enterprises, including more than a dozen large manufacturers, and complete industrial categories of supporting enterprises.

In 2023, the output value of general aviation and unmanned aviation manufacturing industry was about 2 billion yuan. The upstream industry chain gathered 25 upstream enterprises such as raw materials, core components, software and systems represented by Tianhang Zhiyuan, Tianjin Lishen and Tengyun Zhihang. The midstream has gathered more than 20 production enterprises such as AVIC Helicopter, Shenzhou Aircraft, Pegasus Robot, EFY-TEC, i-Kingtec and Tianjin Helicopter. The downstream gathered more than 90 application and service enterprises such as Hangtian Zhongwei, Hanhai Technology and Binhai General Navigation.

At the same time, Tianjin has national universities such as the Civil Aviation University of China (CAUC), which has three provincial and ministerial scientific research platforms directly related to the field of general aviation, and a large number of talents trained to engage in the development and manufacturing of drones.

The Science and Technology Park of CAUC has registered 132 enterprises, with 237 transformed scientific and technological achievements in total, worthy of 44 million yuan conversion amount and nearly 200 million yuan output value.

This year, China Tower (Tianjin) Science and Technology Innovation Center settled in Tiankai Higher Education Innovation Park, mainly to carry out innovation in the field of flight big data application, to carry out technology research and development for ADS-B (automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast) deployment and platform construction, to create and develop related products and solutions, to promote the construction of airspace global awareness network, and to layout low-altitude economic industry chain, so as to promote the implementation of industrialization.

Besides, Tianjin also has a key laboratory for the study of urban air mobility (UAM) and low-altitude communication navigation monitoring, which can provide talents and technical support for enterprises. And key UAV enterprises such as China Helicopter Design and Research Institute, EFY-TEC, and i-Kingtec actively participate in the construction of national standards and norms. So far they have edited or participated in a total of about 15 national standards, industry standards, group standards and several enterprise standards.

With connected mountains and plains, and rivers to sea, Tianjin is very potential in low-altitude economic application scenarios. At present, Tianjin focuses on the fields of“low-altitude + logistics, low-altitude + agriculture, low-altitude + cultural tourism, and low-altitude + governance”, creating and forming a multi-business application scenario of high-end business, tourism and sight-seeing, efficient logistics, aerial surveying and mapping, agriculture, forestry and plant protection, port management, maritime inspection, smart city, patrol inspection and others, promoting the development of low-altitude economic industries.