China Daily:

I have two questions. Many map software operators have adopted BDS as their preferred positioning and navigation service option. Can you illustrate some other scenarios involving such high-accuracy applications in our daily life? Moreover, BDS officially launched a trial application for lane-level navigation recently. What do you think of its prospects? Thank you. 

Ran Chengqi:

Thanks for your question. Just now, I talked about the application of BeiDou's high-precision positioning services. BDS has already provided positioning accuracy at 5 meters and above. However, with economic and social development, the positioning accuracy of 5 meters can no longer meet the needs of users, as the demand for accuracy in socioeconomic development is getting higher and higher. For example, there is a higher demand for accuracy in self-driving technologies, ride-hailing services, deformation monitoring, mudslide monitoring, precision agriculture, and other fields. What shall we do? We have innovatively proposed to build a ground-based augmentation system and achieve higher accuracy through matching and integrating the system with BDS across the country.

Now a nationwide network of BDS ground-based augmentation has been built to provide real-time meter-level, decimeter-level, centimeter-level, and post-processing millimeter-level high-precision positioning services for industrial users and the general public. For ground-based augmentation service, its real-time positioning accuracy can reach 2 centimeters horizontally and 5 centimeters vertically. The post-processing accuracy can reach 2 millimeters horizontally and 5 millimeters vertically. Such high-precision positioning services will lead to more diverse applications and services. For example, we have expanded application scenarios to precision agriculture, deformation monitoring, autonomous driving, electric power inspection, smart ports, and bike sharing.

Let me give you a few examples. At present, this network has provided BDS accelerated positioning and BDS high-precision services for more than 1.5 billion users in more than 230 countries and regions, with services delivered 2 trillion times in total, equivalent to nearly 3 billion on average per day. At present, BDS has provided high-precision positioning services for more than 20 million mobile phones in the country. You also mentioned lane-level navigation just now. In this regard, we have applied high-precision services to people's daily driving and vehicle navigation in a pilot program. It has been carried out in eight cities in China, including Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Dongguan, Chengdu, Chongqing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Tianjin. Going forward, we will further expand the program nationwide.

At present, BDS also provides high-precision services for a total of 1.1 million shared bicycles in China and 200,000 electronic fences for shared bike parking in 12 cities across the country. Haphazard parking of shared bicycles, a problem plaguing the city, has been tackled by BDS high-precision services. I am also a user of shared bicycles. If the bicycle is not parked in the designated zone, the rider will not be able to lock the bike. Through this technical method, relevant departments can adjust guidelines for high-precision application scenarios.

At the same time, this network also provides high-precision positioning services for 21 models of smart cars in China, with a mileage of over 2.5 billion kilometers, and for a total of 50,000 industrial drones of domestic drone companies. All of this shows that BDS high-precision applications point to the future of China's satellite navigation industry and has a broad market. We also look forward to seeing more uses of BDS high-precision services in all walks of life. Thank you.