Text | Liu Yilun
Editor | Wu Rui
36氪 was informed that the L4 low-speed self-driving small unmanned car “Ushi Xiaoche” received tens of millions of yuan in A+ round of financing. This round of financing was led by Haier Group and China Jinmao, and the only capital followed. Previously, “Youshi Xiaoche” received tens of millions of RMB in Series A financing in December 2020, 10 million RMB in angel round financing in 2019, and millions of yuan in seed round financing in 2018.
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“Ushi Car” was established in March 2018. Through self-developed low-speed automatic driving and 6-wheel chassis, it has realized low-cost, low-configuration, low-power low-speed automatic driving, forming its core competitiveness.
Lin Peisen, founder and CEO of “Ushi Car” told 36氪 that the core of low-speed autonomous driving lies in three-dimensional composition positioning and navigation. “Ushi Car” uses binocular cameras to achieve three-dimensional composition positioning and navigation through self-developed computer vision. Compared with the 16-line laser technology widely used in the market, the binocular camera greatly reduces the manufacturing cost.
At the same time, Ushicar can extract 3D contour features in different environments of strong and weak light, and by setting the extraction range of lines, only the core part of the map remains, and the rest are changed due to environmental changes. The map elements will not have much impact on the operation of the car, which is also a very big advantage of visual contrast laser.
The six-wheel chassis technology draws on the structure of the outer space exploration unmanned vehicle, which improves the stability of the car and the ability to overcome obstacles. Due to the improvement of its stability, it can avoid the interference of foreign objects on the trajectory of the car, so as to avoid the situation that the traditional two-wheeled unmanned vehicle deviates from the route and loses its positioning due to external interference. The improvement of the obstacle-surmounting ability is conducive to the passage of the car on the up and down slopes, and the highest step can be up to 10 cm. The improvement of obstacle-crossing ability makes the use of the car more diversified, and the car can be used both indoors and outdoors, providing a “last mile” unmanned vehicle solution for offline marketing and new logistics.
In terms of merchant operation, “Ushi Car” is also equipped with a SaaS system to serve merchants. The merchant can see the whole system of the back-end power management of his car, the management of goods, the setting of the car, the delivery of advertising vouchers, the package marketing activities, and the income. The various data are disassembled to judge the effect of Youshi trolley advertising and user conversion efficiency.
“Youshi Car” takes traffic-based scenarios as its primary entry scenario. The car-based 3D composition positioning and navigation capabilities are conducive to cutting into scenes with high traffic and high mobility, and forming a competitive advantage in this scene. At the same time, in a traffic-based scenario, it is difficult for it to fall into product homogeneity. The two different cars made by the two companies have completely different abilities to attract traffic. On the other hand, by entering into cooperation with commercial real estate developers and prioritizing the layout of business districts, it can make it more difficult for competitors to enter the market through economies of scale and network, thus creating business barriers.
In the offline marketing scenario, the trolley itself has formed a closed commercial loop, and store brands can use the “Ushi trolley” to bring products to nearby places with dense traffic for sale. Users can buy goods from the car by scanning the code on WeChat, and can also get red envelopes, vouchers, and other preferential activities released by merchants. Solve the pain point of “no business if customers don’t enter the store” through the car’s independent customer acquisition model. At the same time, it is also possible to rely on trolleys to attract customers into the store for verification, increase the number of customers in the store, help customers form a route memory for the store, and increase the number of “returning customers”.
“Ushi Car” has a cooling and heating function, and can sell fresh ready-to-eat goods in summer and winter. There are also multiple electronic advertising screens and 42-inch laser projection, which allow brands to reach nearby consumers, allowing offline stores to generate additional revenue and increase brand exposure of stores.
On average, each car can bring 200,000 exposures to the store every month. According to the Internet CPM advertisement exposure price for every 1,000 exposures, it can save nearly 10,000 yuan in advertising expenditures for the brand every month.
Lin Peisen told 36氪 that there are two differences between “Ushi Car” and domestic service robots. The first dimension is the scenario: instead of trying to replace the more flexible human cost logic, let the machine do the income generation that humans are not good at. The second dimension is technology. “Ushi Car” replaces 16-line LiDAR with self-developed computer vision to achieve L4 low-speed automatic driving. It can run in large scenes and high dynamic crowd environments.
In June 2022, “Ushi Car” signed orders for thousands of units of commercial properties such as Wanda, Sunac, Hopson, R&F Plaza, Joy City, etc. At the same time, it has also reached cooperation with many chain brands, such as Lujiaoxiang, Siyun Milk Gai Gong Tea, Happy Lemon, Ben Gong’s Tea, Du Niang Hot Pot, etc. The offline brands of cooperation are more diversified, which also shows that they have a large room for growth.
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Regarding the landing challenges faced by most L4 unmanned vehicles, CEO Lin Peisen believes that there are three reasons for the difficulty of landing many L4 self-driving unmanned vehicles: first, the cost is too high, second, the size is too large, and third, there is no clear payer. The core difference between “Ushi Car” and other L4 unmanned vehicles is that technology-driven cost reduction, compact size can cover indoor and outdoor scenes, and there is a clear offline store brand as the payer.
Lin Peisen said that offline stores are cost-sensitive, so the biggest technical challenge in this scenario is how to achieve low-cost low-speed autonomous driving. If you want to meet the budget of offline stores, you need to use low-configured computing platforms and low-profile sensors to develop low-computation, low-cost, and low-power L4 low-speed autonomous driving solutions for scenarios. At present, many L4 unmanned vehicles do not have low cost, and the time period for rewriting the code based on the scene is too long. Many robotics companies do not have low-speed autonomous driving capabilities and cannot penetrate this scenario in the short term.
“Youshi Xiaoche” currently has accumulated a large amount of technical and operational data in the business district. Next, it will expand its business and extension lines around the 3-kilometer delivery scene around the business district. When it comes to future development plans, Lin Peisen told 36氪 that after this round of financing, “Youshi Car” will accelerate the replication of business district scenarios.
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Wang Wenjiang, a partner of Haier Jinmao Fund Haichuanghui, said, “Ushi Car has significantly reduced the cost of L4 self-driving small unmanned vehicles through self-developed computer vision technology and an innovative 6-wheel chassis. Through the cost reduction and barriers brought by technological innovation, it can not only help offline store brands to quickly acquire customers and open source in the post-epidemic era, but also enable last-mile delivery scenarios. This kind of project with long-term transformation of user value has good long-term thinking and is more likely to form exponential growth. “
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