Automotive technology company Human Horizons is conducting a smart city project called the Vehicle-Road-City Integrated Smart City in the artificial intelligence hub of the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park in Shanghai, China. Part of the company’s larger strategic blueprint, called ‘3 Smart,’ the project will combine the power of 5G, vehicle-to-everything technology, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence and will lay the groundwork for high-tech roads and autonomous vehicles that will certainly be necessary in the future as cities become more and more connected.
The specific goal of the project is to develop a smart ecosystem comprised of autonomous driving buses, a smart road network and smart city traffic management monitoring center.
Ding Lei, chairman of Human Horizons, said that the project demonstrates the ambition and practicality of the company’s “3 Smart” strategy.
“The development of future human mobility must be combined with the intelligentization of roads and cities,” he continued. “While much progress is being made, it will still be some time before Human Horizons’ smart city can be rolled out on a much larger scale. However, if we can cut through the red tape, Human Horizons’ smart city could stand as a shining example of how science and technology can improve daily life for all people.”
While Human Horizons has previously made a name for itself in the world of battery electric vehicles, the July 2019 release of the all-electric premium brand of HiPhi, the first truly smart 5G-V2X capable vehicle, brought the company to wider attention as a key player in the transition to smart urban infrastructure.
HiPhi 1 can seamlessly integrate into the V2X autonomous driving traffic management system of the smart city, and its L3 dual redundant autonomous driving systems allows for higher levels of autonomous driving in the future.
LiDAR technology, which uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges to a target, will also be critical to the Shanghai smart city project. Human Horizons hopes to demonstrate how the technology can be used to support 5G networks. In the Shanghai project, specifically, the traffic management monitoring center receives and analyzes data collected from the road and the three autonomous shuttles that travel through the park, providing, according to the company, a successful demonstration and holistic solution for the vision of accident-free, emission-free and congestion-free mobility.
Lei revealed that Human Horizons expects a future filled with their smart roads and cities. “It will be awesome,” he said.
