The Chinese decided to create the world's first city especially for drones

17 April 2019

The new city of Sunyani will become a testing ground for technologies in automated driving

In China decided to create the world's first city with a special infrastructure tailored to use only unmanned vehicles. It's called Sunyani (Xiongan) and represents the 19th district of the new state-level area of 100 km², located in the city district of Baoding, Hebei province. It is assumed that the city, founded only in April 2017, will become a special high-tech zone, extending Beijing and will represent a model of a modern socialist city, a high-level associated with agglomerations of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei.

Accordingly, the CPC Central Committee and the state Council of China approved 14 APR 2018 "plan for the development of a new district of Sunyani in Hebei province", and on 25 December of the same year, the State Council approved the "master plan for the development of a new district of Sunyani in Hebei province (2018-2035 years)".

The government expects to invest in the new city of $583 billion and bring its population up to a population of 2.5 million people. Company Baidu has signed a contract with the local administration for the creation of the so-called "cities of artificial intelligence". The project has joined the infamous Alibaba Group.

The aim of the project is the creation of a special urban infrastructure that will enable a high degree of reliability, security and sustainability to manage traffic flows, coordinating the movement of unmanned vehicles. Accordingly, the city universally will be installed sensors, applied to traffic lights with cameras in computer vision, system of recognition of pedestrians at intersections, including, by the way, their age, and also drastically reduced the number of Parking spaces that will be possible due to the high flow optimization bespilotnikov, and the use of underground Parking.

In the longer term it is planned generally to release the Central part of the city from cars, giving it exclusively to pedestrians and cyclists, and the main trunk will have to go into the tunnels. Furthermore, the movement of the underground tunnels will occur at high speeds.

Such a revolutionary upgrade of the transport system can be implemented only with the use of unmanned vehicles (EVS), but it is practically impossible using conventional "chelovekonapravleny" cars because of the complexity of traffic control.