From High Speed Rail To Field: Polar Robot'S "Overtaking On Curve" Entrepreneurship

"Are you in history? I think we have, and can, go down in history. " Recalling the ups and downs of two startups, Wang Xinyu, chairman of Jimu robot, asked himself in an interview in dongshahu fund town.

Polar vision robot is an intelligent robot company with binocular vision as its core in Suzhou park. It is also the co-founder of Wang Xinyu and Dong Xuesong. As early as 2015, Huaxing Zhiyuan and Shenzhen BAOLILAI technology co founded by the two companies were reorganized and listed on the stock market, becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Shenzhou high-speed rail (Stock Code: 00008) on the main board of Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

One day in 2016, Dong Xuesong asked in an overseas phone call, "Xinyu, you have succeeded, but what have you done for your hometown?"

Dong Xuesong is Wang Xinyu's high school classmate, and they both know each other well. His friend's questions "torture" Wang Xinyu, which reminds him of the farming scene he saw in the field when he was young.

Soon, Wang Xinyu resigned from his position as director and deputy general manager of Shenzhou high speed rail. In the summer of this year, polar vision robot was registered in Suzhou park, and Dong Xuesong once again became the co-founder of Wang Xinyu.

Overtaking on Curve: from railway to field

Wang Xinyu had been dealing with high-speed rail before he was 45 years old. In his early years, he worked in the Scientific Research Institute of Harbin Railway Administration. His pioneering work was Huaxing Zhiyuan, which mainly engaged in intelligent safety inspection of rail transit.

After founding the polar eye robot, he and his team headed into Queshan, Henan Province, on the North Bank of the Huaihe River and became farmers. Located in the hinterland of Central Plains, engineers from seven countries have carried out verification experiments for two years.

In 13 provinces and cities across the country, we have completed the effect verification of different terrain such as plains, hills and mountains, and the team has officially pushed the UAV products for plant protection into mass production stage.

From the perspective of capital attention, in 2017 and 2018, Jimu robot obtained tens of millions of yuan of round B financing from compound investment, Yuanhe holding, CITIC agricultural fund, Syngenta and other institutions.

Huaxing Zhiyuan, founded in the early years, has become one of the contributors to overtaking on the curve of China's high-speed rail. After founding the polar vision robot, Wang Xinyu and Dong Xuesong hope to present the story of overtaking on the curve again in the agricultural field.

In 2016, the field of plant protection UAVs was not a new thing from a global perspective. Overseas markets already had Yamaha, precisionhawk, agribotix, dronedeploy and other enterprises. In China, there were also market players such as Dajiang, Jifei technology, Hanhe and Quanfeng.

Wang Xinyu told reporters that the core competitiveness of polar robot products is: "now let the UAV stick to the crop surface 0.5 to 0.7 meters, and maintain the speed of 5 meters / second to complete the spraying operation. There is only one company in the world known as polar."

The plant protection UAV developed by polar robot can realize full vision obstacle avoidance. In other words, the UAV can automatically identify the boundary of the plot without surveying and mapping in advance. It can avoid the obstacles of fixed or even moving in the field, and can realize the operation of one person, multiple aircraft and group flying at the same time.

Science and technology enabling agriculture

The core technology of polar vision robot is machine vision. The core members of the team mainly come from the automobile industry including Tesla and Bosch and the safety inspection industry of high-speed rail, but they choose to put the product application scenarios in the field.

"Many of us grew up in the countryside, hoping to bring about some changes in agriculture. We also have higher requirements for intelligent agricultural engineering teams and robots. " If Wang Yu and agricultural engineers are not able to attract so many excellent scientists, they will not be able to change their vision.

Seeds are the chips of agriculture. The product design and development and trial production of pesticide spraying were completed, and the polar robot team continued to invest in the product research and development in the field of breeding. This time, their experiments and R & D started in South America and took the lead in application and commercialization in Brazil. At present, it is not only carried out in different provinces of China, but also being verified and applied in Thailand, the United States, Romania, India and other countries.

The application of UAV in agriculture, forestry and plant protection includes pesticide spraying and crop detection. According to Frost & Sullivan's report, agriculture and forestry plant protection accounts for 30.7% of all application fields of industrial UAVs in China in 2019. It is estimated that the compound annual growth rate of UAV market in plant protection field will reach 47.2% from 2020 to 2014.

In addition to farming efficiency, more important is safety. According to a United Nations statistics, about 200000 people die of pesticides every year, of which 99% are in developing countries. There are no accurate figures for the number of people affected by pesticide exposure, ranging from 1 million to 41 million.

"There is a huge market, huge social value and high technical difficulty here." When Wang Xinyu said this, there was a wall behind Wang Xinyu, which showed the number of UAVs in operation, the distribution of crops in corresponding regions and the number of UAVs in various provinces.

As far as the polar eye robot team is concerned, they are committed to the upgrading of agriculture from mechanization to intelligence today. The end of the future will be the intellectualization based on small intelligent equipment and agricultural big data.

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