Mission AI: China’s riderless bike on a journey into the unknown

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With Mission AI, CGTN's program Rediscovering China looks at how the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence are transforming the way we live our lives.

China loves Artificial Intelligence. The past few years have seen efforts explode to ensure China leads the race in becoming the world’s foremost AI country.

The inclusion of AI both in the 13th Five Year Plan of 2015 and in China’s top legislature’s annual session, the National People’s Congress of 2017 indicates just how serious China is taking its role in the sector moving forward.

Bike-sharing is very popular in China, and now riderless bikes are taking a step further. /CGTN Photo

The plan, according to China’s National Development and Research Commission (NDRC) is to create an AI market worth more than 15 billion US dollars by 2018.

“The difference between Internet start-up companies from a few years back and AI companies now is in funding. It is so much easier for us right now to get funding for projects compared to back in the early days of the Internet,” explains Min Haibao, CEO of Beijing iBingo Smart Tech.

It is this gold rush that many are profiting from to live out their wildest AI dreams. One of those is that of the riderless bike.

Assistant professor Zhao Minguo from Qinghua University’s Department of Automation has been working with his team on exactly that: a bike that can move forward without a rider and follow people around on its own.

The project was initiated in 2014 in cooperation with Internet giant Baidu, and has attracted a total of around 450,000 US dollars investment.

“At the time, Baidu was starting to look into driverless and riderless technology. Everyone gets the idea of driverless cars, but what about riderless bikes? Well, China is a big cycling nation and so it made sense for us to break into this area,” says assistant professor Zhao.

Right now, the bike is able to ride at a speed of up to 20 km/h. That is a little less than the average cycling speed of a fit person within a fairly even city. Where it gets tricky is going slow, as keeping the balance becomes more difficult.

While the bike cannot be stopped as of yet, it is able to go at a minimum speed at 1.6 km/h. However, the researchers are now focusing on ironing out these kinks, so that their riderless mode of transport will be able to hit the markets by the end of 2018.

Assistant professor Zhao Minguo has been running the project. /CGTN Photo

That being said, one of the biggest questions of the day seems to be its intended function.

“One of the first questions I get when people come to visit is ‘What can it actually do?’” says Zhao. “Isn’t a bike’s purpose that someone rides it?”

While the team is developing the bike in such a way that it could eventually support a rider, assistant professor Zhao actually believes the bike could be used mostly to transport items, if it were redeveloped into a two-wheeler motorbike or one of China’s little delivery carts for example. The other option, he says, is to sell it as a very niche product for people working out in nature.

“We are thinking that for those young people, the bike could follow them around transporting water and clothes to cater to their needs,” explains Zhao.

Whatever its final use will be, both Zhao and his assistant stress that currently functionality is not really the focus of their project. For them, it is very much about the research and developing new technologies as they ride China’s wave of AI enthusiasm.

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