A visitor (1st R) learns about a self-driving vehicle equipped with BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) during the 4th International Summit on BDS Applications in Zhuzhou, central China’s Hunan Province, Sept. 24, 2025. (Xinhua/Chen Sihan)
CHANGSHA, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- By simply opening a ride-hailing app and setting a destination, residents in Zhuzhou, a city in central China’s Hunan Province, hop aboard a robotaxi at any of the convenient pick-up points.
Guided by China’s homegrown BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), the city’s autonomous taxis have already served more than 100,000 passengers since they first began transporting people in early August.
"BeiDou’s high-precision positioning can keep autonomous driving safe even in harsh weather or in areas with weak signals, such as elevated roads, tunnels and urban canyons," said Li Leke, manager of Hello Autonomous Driving, who added that Hello Inc. has unveiled its self-developed Robotaxi HR1, with plans for mass production in 2026 and expansion to more than a dozen cities.
Zhuzhou has been designated as a demonstration zone for BDS-enabled autonomous driving, where it is piloting various applications, including robotaxis, self-driving buses, sanitation vehicles and unmanned delivery services.
Named after the Big Dipper constellation, BDS has become integral to navigation in emerging fields such as intelligent driving, agriculture, humanoid robots and low-altitude aviation.
Its applications were highlighted at the 4th International Summit on BDS Applications, which concluded Thursday in Zhuzhou. The summit featured an expansive exhibition area of 50,000 square meters, showcasing over 1,000 demonstration scenarios.
BDS is already reshaping daily life. About 24 million people in China use shared bicycles every day, and the system is instrumental in their management.
Chen Jinpei, CEO of Qianxun Spatial Intelligence Inc., said that problems such as finding bikes and dealing with irregular parking have been resolved after shared bicycles were equipped with BeiDou-enabled chips offering centimeter-level positioning.
"Now, with positioning accuracy improved from about 10 meters to 30 centimeters, people can easily and precisely locate bikes," Chen said. City management authorities can also monitor trajectories and distribution in real time, enabling more efficient oversight of shared bicycles.
Mapping services have also been transformed. Amap, one of China’s largest navigation platforms, uses BDS to provide users with positioning services more than 900 billion times a day, according to Liu Zhenfei, chairman of Amap. "Users can be alerted to congestion or accidents up to 3 kilometers ahead and receive proactive suggestions for the best route," he said.
BDS has achieved high-precision lane-level navigation, covering more than 99 percent of urban and rural roads across the country as of 2024, noted the white paper on the development of China’s satellite navigation and positioning service industry released in May.
The total output value of China’s satellite navigation and positioning service industry reached 575.8 billion yuan (about 80.96 billion U.S. dollars) in 2024, up 7.39 percent year on year, it said.
As a core supplier of global satellite navigation systems recognized by the United Nations, BDS has been fully integrated into the standards of 11 international organizations, including civil aviation, maritime affairs and mobile communications, the white paper noted.
China began to develop its own navigation satellite system in 1994. BDS-1 entered service and began providing positioning services in China at the end of 2000. Since that time, China has become the third country in the world with a navigation satellite system.
BDS-2 was completed in 2012, providing passive positioning services to the Asia-Pacific region. In 2020, BDS-3 was formally commissioned to provide satellite navigation services worldwide. Today, BDS provides services and products to more than 140 countries and regions, according to a report released during the summit.
China and the Arab countries have achieved fruitful results in collaboration regarding BDS.
"Through joint precision agriculture cooperation projects in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other countries, we have utilized BDS to realize intelligent irrigation and fertilization, increasing the average yield of local crops by over 15 percent, which has effectively addressed the issue of sustainable agricultural development in arid regions of Arab countries," said Ahmed Mustafa Fahmy Hafez, head of the League of Arab States Secretariat delegation at the summit.
In addition, the efficiency of container loading at the Dubai port has increased by 20 percent, while the turnaround time of goods was reduced by nearly a third, he said.
原文地址：http://en.people.cn/n3/2025/0926/c90000-20371243.html