The BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), a global navigation system
independently developed and operated by China, has achieved in-depth application
and extensive growth in various fields.
In the agricultural sector, BeiDou-related deep soil loosening machines, as well as
drones for plant protection and seed sowing, can be remotely controlled and managed.
In the forestry sector, BeiDou terminal products can assist forest rangers and fire
guards to patrol forests and check their routes.
The navigation system has also been applied in other fields, including dam
deformation monitoring, the establishment of management and monitoring platforms
for the transportation of construction debris in urban areas and measurement of the
height of Mount Qomolangma, among others.
Statistics suggest that there were more than one billion terminal devices with the BDS
positioning service by the end of 2021.
The BeiDou system has comprehensively served transportation, public security,
emergency management, agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery, and
many other industries. It has also been integrated into the construction of
infrastructure projects in the fields of electric power, finance and communications,
widely adopted in the fields of mass consumption, sharing economy and people’s
livelihood.
The BDS has achieved a comprehensive breakthrough in mass consumption
represented by its extensive application in smartphones and smart wearable devices.
The world’s major chipmakers, including component providers for smartphones, can
provide products that widely support the BDS. BDS ground-based augmentation
messaging has been applied in smartphones, with meter-level positioning capabilities.
In 2021, the number of China-made smartphone shipments with BDS application
support reached 324 million, accounting for 94.5 percent of the country’s total that
very year.
The BDS’s high-precision positioning and timing services had been used over 100
billion times per month as of March 2022, of which the monthly requests for the
system’s acceleration auxiliary positioning service had exceeded 60 billion, and that
for its real-time high-precision positioning services with centimeter-level accuracy
and sub-meter level accuracy had surpassed 48 billion.
At present, the BDS’s acceleration auxiliary positioning service has been embedded in
almost every China’s homemade smartphone. The BDS is employed to provide
precise positioning and timing services for all kinds of intelligent machines, from
automobiles, drones, shared bikes and buses, to road infrastructure facilities, and to
monitoring equipment of bridges and mines.
The BeiDou system has provided services for a total of more than 1.1 billion people
from more than 100 countries and regions around the world.
The system has achieved integration across industries and regions, seeing thriving
applications such as intelligent vehicle infrastructure cooperative systems and
unmanned delivery, among others.
Industries won’t achieve digital and intelligent development without the support of
major timing and positioning infrastructure.
By providing timing and positioning services, the BDS has become a major
infrastructure that supports the development of the digital economy, being of great
significance for promoting the synergy of the digital industry, digital transformation
of industries and digital governance, according to Yang Changfeng, chief designer of
the BDS, who is also an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
China has included the application of BeiDou into its plans for many industries. A
document issued in April 2022 on the key tasks for the development of digital villages
specified that the country will promote the adoption of BeiDou terminal products in
agricultural production.
The country also stated in a recent plan that it will vigorously develop smart
transportation and speed up the application of the BDS during its 14th Five-Year Plan
period (2021-2025). Specifically, China will push forward the innovative application
of the BDS in autonomous driving, intelligent shipping, intelligent railway, intelligent
civil aviation and intelligent postal service, and build a BeiDou-driven industrial chain
in the transportation sector, the plan said.
The constantly improving BDS and its increasing capabilities lay a solid foundation
for the vigorous development of the BeiDou industry.
According to Yang, the size of the BeiDou industry is expected to reach one trillion
yuan ($150.07 billion) around 2025, calculated by an average annual growth rate of
20 percent.
China aims to develop a widely ubiquitous, integrated and intelligent national
comprehensive positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) system based on the BDS by
2035, to provide core support for the development of intelligent and unmanned
systems.
By then, the BDS will better serve users from across the world and benefit all
mankind by providing global users with full-coverage and highly reliable PNT service
in environments such as indoors, outdoors, deep sea, and deep space.
