Chinese start-up Human Horizons is building a ‘Smart City’ infrastructure in the AI hub of the Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park in Shanghai. The project, called the Vehicle-Road-City Integrated Smart City, aims to lay the groundwork for high-tech roads and autonomous vehicles in future smart cities in China and overseas. 

The initiative is part of a larger Human Horizons’ strategic blueprint called ‘3 Smart’ which consists of smart vehicles, smart roads, and smart cities. 

Human Horizons is best known for battery electric vehicles, whose development is led by former Jaguar Land Rover Special Vehicles boss Mark Stanton. Over the past twelve months the company has broadened its scope, with the ‘Smart Road’ project in Yancheng, China in January 2019, the release of the all-electric premium brand SUV, the HiPhi 1, in July 2019, and now the implementation of the ‘Smart City’.

In the 100,000-square-metre AI hub at Zhangjiang, the ‘Smart City’ project of Human Horizons is using 5G, V2X collaboration, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence to realise an ecosystem of autonomous driving ‘smart vehicle’ buses, ‘smart road’ network, and ‘smart city’ traffic management monitoring centre.

LiDAR technology is also on display, demonstrating solutions on how it can be used to support 5G networks. The Human Horizons traffic management monitoring centre receives and analyses data from the road and the three autonomous shuttles travelling within the park. 

Human Horizons claims it as the first 5G autonomous driving traffic management archetype in the world that integrates the vehicle-road-city ecosystem. 

Ding Lei, chairman of Human Horizons, said “The implementation of the ‘Smart City’ project demonstrates that our ‘3 Smart’ strategy is both an ambitious as well as a practical goal. The development of future human mobility must be combined with the ‘intelligentisation’ of roads and cities. While much progress is being made, it will still be some time before Human Horizons’ ‘Smart City’ can be rolled out on a much larger scale. However, if we can cut through the red tape, Human Horizons’ ‘Smart City’ could stand as a shining example of how science and technology can improve daily life for all people.”

“We are going to continue to evolve and develop our technologies and the opportunities will surely continue to manifest themselves. We look forward to a future with our smart roads and our smart cities. It will be awesome. But, for Human Horizons this is just the beginning.”