King Long Won National S&T Progress Award

On Jan 8^th, the National S&T Progress Award Meeting was held in Beijing. The project collaborate researched by King Long and Tsinghua University won the second award of National S&T Progress Award.

The National S&T Progress Award is one of five National S&T Awards set up by the State Council. It aims at awarding the institutions which make creative contributions to applying advanced S&T achievements, promoting industrialization of high and new technologies, and completing major S&T projects and plans.

As the public media of communication and the production tools of operators, the safety and energy saving of passenger vehicles are the concerns of our customers. Using the intelligent network and high and new technologies to solve difficult problems is the original intention of King Long cooperating with Tsinghua University in initiation of project research. The auxiliary system of vehicle intelligent driving is not only an application of high and new technologies integrating vehicle, electronics, information and control, but also the only road to realize the unmanned vehicles. These systems were monopolized by foreign suppliers for quite a long time in the past, restricting our development and industrialization of intelligent vehicle technology. From 2009 to 2016, the joint R&D project team led by Li Keqiang, Chief of Department of Automotive Engineering, Tsinghua University, with participants such as Chen Weiqiang, CTO of King Long, spent 7 years on technical breakthrough and finally achieved success.

The project team proposes the new common structure for the auxiliary system of vehicle intelligent driving for the first time. Specifically, the information sharing for multiple onboard sensors, the resource sharing for domain controllers, and the operation joint administration for multiple actuators achieve the integrated optimization and design for multiple systems and functions, promoting the energy saving and ensuring the safety of vehicles. For example, this technology can be used to determine the best oil saving operation rules, identify and make corrections for the drivers' behaviors featuring high energy consumption, predict the traveling track of the vehicle in front at the next stage in a real-time manner, and use the traveling track of the vehicle in front to calculate and predict its power demands, achieving the purpose of energy saving.

This research makes a breakthrough in the auxiliary technical bottleneck of vehicle energy saving and safe driving. It forms series of core technologies with independent intellectual property, including 25 authorized patents for inventions and 15 utility models and software works. It breaks the technical monopoly of the USA, Japan and other developed countries in the aspect of intelligent driving. It significantly improves both development level and product competitiveness for the auxiliary system of vehicle intelligent driving in China. The intelligent driving auxiliary products developed and researched win the bids when competing with parts suppliers of internationally known vehicles. This technology realizes a large scale of front assembly and mating for both passenger vehicle enterprises and commercial vehicle enterprises in China for the first time. The King Long project team introduced that "This technology can be applied to many aspects. At present, King Long is mainly focused on the medium- and high-end passenger vehicles with a height over 9m. Till now, more than 3,000 passenger vehicles have used this technology."

The technical breakthrough in the auxiliary system of vehicle intelligent driving made together with Tsinghua University is only the first step made by King Long in the aspect of intelligent vehicles. The movement to the unmanned vehicles with higher technical difficulty reflects King Long's persistent pursuit in both R&D and innovation of forward-looking technologies.