EHang’s AAV technology used during emergency flood response exercise in China

EHang demon­strat­ed the appli­ca­tion of its AAV tech­nolo­gies dur­ing a recent emer­gency flood response exer­cise in Shaoguan, Chi­na.

Organ­ised by the local gov­ern­ment in order to pre­pare for the upcom­ing flood sea­son, the exer­cise sim­u­lat­ed a bank col­lapse of the Wujiang Riv­er — which threat­ened the safe­ty of the town and its schools.

Local author­i­ties car­ried out ten mea­sures to com­bat the flood, which includ­ed trans­fer­ring peo­ple at risk, send­ing an emer­gency res­cue team, res­cu­ing drown­ing peo­ple with boats and deliv­er­ing relief sup­plies.

And as a sup­port­ing part­ner, EHang sent ten remote­ly-man­aged AAVs to four emer­gency sites which were con­trolled from a com­mand-and-con­trol cen­tre. Each one live-streamed the process of emer­gency repair, flood dis­charge and staff trans­fer via built-in HD cam­eras.

The AAVs also accu­rate­ly dropped life jack­ets and oth­er relief mate­ri­als to the vic­tims, which was one of the crit­i­cal emer­gency response capa­bil­i­ties need­ed for flood relief.

EHang was able to demon­strate the tech­ni­cal advan­tages of pre­set routes and cen­tralised man­age­ment of its AAVs, which can be equipped with dif­fer­ent task mod­ules and con­nect­ed with the com­mand-and-con­trol cen­tre in real-time through 4G or 5G net­works.

Hu Huazhi, Founder, Chair­man and CEO of EHang, said: “In the future, city man­age­ment will be more intel­li­gent, inte­grat­ed and data-ori­ent­ed. I am thrilled that EHang joined hands with the Shaoguan city gov­ern­ment to lead this trend of smart city man­age­ment.

“We will con­tin­ue to con­tribute our tech­no­log­i­cal advan­tages toward build­ing Shaoguan as a mod­el of a smart city util­is­ing com­pre­hen­sive AAV appli­ca­tions.”

EHang formed a strate­gic part­ner­ship with the Shaoguan gov­ern­ment in Octo­ber 2017, in order to devel­op an AAV com­mand-and-con­trol cen­ter. So far, EHang has worked with both the Pub­lic Secu­ri­ty Bureau and the Health Bureau to utilise its AAVs for emer­gency response and epi­dem­ic pre­ven­tion after floods and typhoons, which great­ly improves the gov­ern­men­t’s man­age­ment of emer­gency sit­u­a­tions.

In 2018, EHang launched the com­mand-and-con­trol cen­tre in Shaoguan and went through tri­al oper­a­tion. With capac­i­ty for more than 60 staff, the com­mand-and-con­trol cen­tre inte­grates mul­ti­ple gov­ern­ment func­tions for emer­gency response and smart city man­age­ment, includ­ing the five core func­tions of mon­i­tor­ing, sched­ul­ing, con­trol­ling, ear­ly warn­ing and cen­tralised man­age­ment. 

The com­mand-and-con­trol cen­tre has respond­ed to the needs of dif­fer­ent author­i­ties such as the Shaoguan Emer­gency Man­age­ment Bureau, the Water Affairs Bureau, Forestry Bureau, the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Bureau and the Traf­fic Police Detach­ment for smart city man­age­ment.

In the cur­rent fight against Covid-19, EHang also coop­er­at­ed with local gov­ern­ment depart­ments to con­duct air inspec­tions on key indus­tri­al parks, roads, food mar­kets and reser­voirs with mega­phones and high-def­i­n­i­tion cam­eras.

This has enabled ‘all-round’ broad­cast­ing and ‘non-con­tact’ inspec­tions to ensure the safe­ty of front­line epi­dem­ic pre­ven­tion staff.