China's low-altitude economy is entering a phase of rapid growth, offering people more excitement in the skies and bringing convenience through innovative aerial vehicle applications.
Various aerial vehicles are increasingly employed in China in more diversified scenarios.
In east China's Jiangsu Province, a domestically produced two-ton unmanned electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft successfully completed a flight across a stretch of the Yangtze River in early August, with its highest speed at 200 kilometers per hour.
The cutting-edge "air taxi" service of eVTOL aircraft, developed by a Shanghai-based start-up named AutoFlight, is expected to gain traction as it can provide a viable and affordable transportation option for tourists and commuters.
In Wuxi City of the province, aerial routes offer a unique perspective of the scenic ancient canal, demonstrating the potential of low-altitude flights for tourism.
In Chengdu City of southwest China's Sichuan Province, a cross-border e-commerce imported goods package was delivered via drone from the comprehensive bonded zone to a customer in just two minutes.
The State Council has just issued a document on ideas to promote the high-quality development of service consumption, proposing to encourage the development of new business models such as low-altitude flight. This is undoubtedly a clear signal that will further enrich the "low-altitude plus" application scenarios.
In the first half of this year, China registered over 600,000 new drones, resulting in a 48-percent increase in the number of drones from the end of last year.
Currently, over 14,000 drone companies hold valid civil unmanned aircraft operation certificates, and over 225,000 people possess unmanned drone operator licenses.
Last year, the scale of China's low-altitude economy surpassed 500 billion yuan (around 70 billion U.S. dollars), with the first half of this year generating 300 billion yuan (around 42 billion U.S. dollars) in new output value. Its scale is expected to reach 2 trillion yuan (around 279 billion U.S. dollars) by 2030.
Booming low-altitude economy has more application scenarios
Booming low-altitude economy has more application scenarios
Shanghai, a leading force for Chinese modernization, is accelerating the pace of building itself into a science and technology innovation center with global influence.
The tech-savvy metropolis is now speeding up the transition from structure building to function strengthening. Taking strengthening the capability of fostering original sci-tech innovations as the main task, it is pursuing both sci-tech innovation and institutional innovation to significantly improve its comprehensive strength in science and technology as well as the overall effects of innovations.
Over the past 10 years since Shanghai began building itself into an international science and technology innovation center, it has reaped fruitful results in sci-tech innovation, which has pushed the metropolis' GDP across the 4-trillion-yuan (about 570 billion U.S. dollars) mark.
In 2023, Shanghai's total research and development expenditure accounted for 4.4 percent of its GDP, and the city's fiscal expenditure on science and technology rose by 36.7 percent to 52.8 billion yuan (about 7.47 billion U.S. dollars).
Driven by science and technology advances, Shanghai's industrial transformation has sped up. The combined scale of the three leading industries of artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, and biomedicine in the city has reached 1.6 trillion yuan (about 226 billion U.S. dollars).
At the National Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center in Shanghai's Zhangjiang Science City, Qinglong, an open-source general-purpose humanoid robot with a height of 182 centimeters and up to 43 active degrees of freedom, is being trained to pick up oranges.
"After some training, the robot will be able to complete this move by itself when it encounters a similar scenario in the future," said Shi Zhihua, trainer of robot Qinglong.
Thanks to an advanced control software, Qinglong can skillfully perform fast walking, avoid obstacles, go uphill and downhill, and resist impact.
"We plan to build a venue that can simultaneously train 1,000 robots by 2027," Shi said.
The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), a third-generation medium-energy synchrotron light source facility with 46 laboratories, has been operating around the clock to serve researchers from around the country, whose experiments cover a wide range of fields such as life sciences, materials science and chemical catalysis.
"We are using the SSRF's light to observe the phase change process of this material when it's heated to 1,100 degrees Celsius," said Song Shuang, a PhD candidate of Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
"Our team is developing materials for the energy sector," said Miao Zhikai, a researcher of Tianjin University.
"We are developing cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries," said Li Guodong, a researcher of Fudan University.
Though the laboratories at the SSRF have been running at full capacity, researchers still have to apply for them months in advance, reflecting the vibrancy of innovation in Shanghai.
Shanghai blazes sci-tech frontiers to boost innovation-driven modernization
