Reference News Network, October 9 report (Text by Su Xiaozhou, Wang Teng, Liu Fangzhou) Humanoid robots with "time-space backpacks" wander outdoors, and driverless intelligent connected vehicles carry passengers through bustling cities... At the Fourth BeiDou Scale Application International Summit held in Zhuzhou City, Hunan Province, before the National Day holiday, new applications and emerging industries of BeiDou have amazed the guests from various countries. People have witnessed the development of BeiDou's precise positioning, navigation, and timing functions from "trial use" and "usable" to "convenient" and "commonly used," becoming a high-quality global shared public product that helps countries' economic and social development and people's well-being.
Currently, the BeiDou system and related technologies serving more than 140 countries and regions have demonstrated outstanding performance with "centimeter-level positioning," "millisecond-level perception," and "nanosecond-level timing," expanding service scenarios from land to space. In the future, as a key force in human time and space information technology, BeiDou will continue to change the way the world perceives time and space, becoming a "time and space engine" to drive the next technological revolution and empower future development.
BeiDou's "upgrade" expands core technologies
"The BeiDou equipment exhibition hall is amazing, showing me the boundless creativity of human engineering technology!" Entering the BeiDou summit site, American Ann Marie Richard described her surprise at the exhibition.
Entering the Zhuzhou International Convention and Exhibition Center, physical equipment such as rail transit equipment, unmanned surface vessels, and large and medium-sized drones are lined up. Models of the Long March 3B rocket, the "Fendouzhe" deep-sea submersible, as well as high-end application models or real objects such as the "BeiDou Yunchang Bus," "Intelligent Track Train," "Express Drone," and "BeiDou Wearable" are displayed, intuitively demonstrating the extensive application of BeiDou in the fields of "land, sea, air, and space."
The scenario for BeiDou application has extended to the streets of Zhuzhou City, known as a "manufacturing city" and "city of BeiDou." The driverless intelligent connected vehicles powered by the BeiDou satellite navigation system can carry passengers through busy urban areas. Users just need to download and open the Haoluo mobile app, select autonomous driving, and choose intelligent connected vehicles for travel like hailing a taxi. The "BeiDou Yunchang Bus" without fixed routes and stations has served 144,000 passengers within a year. Passengers only need to use a mini program to check the bus location and order personalized travel services. According to experts, this "demand response + dynamic group booking" function relies on BeiDou system, inertial navigation, vehicle networking, and big data algorithms.
Space navigation systems and the time and space information technology and industry built upon them are core elements of scientific and technological strength and development capabilities. Information provided by the Zhuzhou BeiDou Time and Space Information Research Institute shows that since its inception, the Chinese BeiDou system has continuously iterated and developed, playing a "pillar" role in supporting key infrastructure and empowering the digital economy. The "Blue Book on the Development of BeiDou Industry (2025)" released at this BeiDou Summit shows that the total output value of China's satellite navigation and position service industry reached 575.8 billion yuan in 2024. Currently, BeiDou, along with the United States GPS, Russia GLONASS, and the European GALILEO, serves as a "time and space engine" to support future development.
"The scale of BeiDou applications in key sectors of the national economy is nearly 50 million sets, and the application stock in consumer sectors such as mobile phones and cars has exceeded 2 billion sets," said Xiang Libin, vice director of the National Development and Reform Commission, listing a series of data at the opening ceremony of the BeiDou Summit.
This BeiDou Summit also concentrated on releasing and showcasing a batch of leading-edge BeiDou-related new products, new technologies, and new applications. Among them, the innovative research results of Jinwei Jidian, "BeiDou Good Chip," integrates small size, lightweight, integration, and high precision, and the integrated modules that fully utilize the advantages of BeiDou's global high-precision positioning capability and global short message service have formed a product matrix; Huawei BeiDou's BeiDou III short message communication SoC chip can capture satellite signals within no more than two seconds; Qianxun Positioning's MC382 series products, based on self-developed chips, have broken through industry bottlenecks; Wuhan University and China Unicom Smart City Research Institute jointly developed the "Low-altitude Economy · Tianjian Operating System," helping achieve efficient utilization of airspace and connecting air traffic control and communication systems.
All these phenomena convey an important signal: the BeiDou industry value chain is beginning to move from the initial "trial use" and "usable" to "convenient" and "commonly used" and even "essential," mainly characterized by "three modernizations"—infrastructure publicization, capability service subscription, and value delivery scenario-based. With BeiDou time and space data gradually becoming a core production factor that is identifiable, priced, and transferable, the business model has entered a new realm of "ecological co-construction, scenario proliferation, and diversified revenue sharing."
From building the time and space benchmarks of infrastructure to permeating the entire process of key industries, the BeiDou system is empowering the "smart hub" of thousands of industries with its unique advantages of high precision, all-weather, and global coverage, providing full-chain time and space services from data collection to intelligent applications for various industries and promoting the transformation of industries from traditional models to digital and intelligent ones. Behind each achievement, there is a vivid and inspiring BeiDou "empowerment story":
In the transportation industry, which is "time and space sensitive," BeiDou empowerment covers all scenarios from "sky, land, and sea." In the civil aviation field, from takeoff taxiing to cruising and landing, BeiDou's high-precision time and space service provides full-time protection, achieving periodic accurate tracking of flight status by the ground; in the rail transport field, trains can obtain real-time location information and dynamically adjust their operating conditions; in ground transportation, vehicle terminals and BeiDou ground enhancement devices work together, maintaining positioning even in weak signal environments and offering road condition optimization and blind spot warnings; in the vast ocean, BeiDou empowers polar research, long-distance communication, marine ranches, and maritime rescue, building a comprehensive perception marine dynamic monitoring and intelligent maritime rescue system.
In agricultural production, BeiDou has driven smart agriculture into full-chain digitization. Data show that the number of BeiDou terminal applications in agricultural machinery exceeds one million sets. By relying on an agricultural machinery big data platform, operation trajectories and equipment status can be integrated in real time, enabling cross-regional scheduling and remote maintenance, thus establishing a full-process digital management system covering "plowing, sowing, managing, harvesting, and transporting."
In the construction industry, BeiDou breaks through with "high precision + intelligence." Hezhong Sixi's BeiDou high-precision excavator intelligent construction system has a bucket positioning accuracy of centimeters, allowing three-dimensional graphical guidance for precise operations, ensuring 24-hour operations, and when combined with a digital management platform, it can transmit data in real time and automatically generate reports.
In the smart city field, BeiDou also plays an important role. Relying on BeiDou, the city's "earth-space collaboration" monitoring network integrates multi-dimensional data to accurately predict risks and provide minute-level warnings.
BeiDou "goes out" provides public products
This BeiDou Summit attracted delegations from 29 countries and international organizations. Although the exhibition area was much larger than previous years, the booths were still "hard to get." Many specialized forums at the summit had listeners filling the aisles. Previously, many people saw BeiDou as an academic achievement and missed many industrial application opportunities. Now they want to quickly catch up.
CEO Xu Ran of JD Group introduced at the BeiDou Summit that relying on BeiDou has allowed JD to "see more clearly," "operate more steadily," and "go further," better developing its business globally. For example, relying on the global coverage provided by the BeiDou satellite navigation system, JD has accelerated its international business layout: in Saudi Arabia, the BeiDou intelligent delivery system effectively overcame navigation challenges in desert areas, achieving precise and reliable last-mile delivery services; in Europe, it significantly optimized the efficiency of mainline transportation and the "last mile" delivery, greatly shortening the fulfillment time for cross-border packages.
The "Blue Book" states that as of 2025, BeiDou services cover 200 countries and regions worldwide, providing BeiDou system-related services and products to more than 140 countries and regions, with a global BeiDou-enabled mobile terminal coverage rate exceeding 50%. Progress has also been made in international standard alignment, with BeiDou being incorporated into the standard systems of 11 international organizations, including the International Civil Aviation Organization. The 22 major signed projects at this BeiDou Summit include multiple international projects, marking that the large-scale application of BeiDou is accelerating beyond geographical limitations, moving from "deep penetration domestically" to "global value expansion."
In Thailand, through the signing of a cooperation agreement to build BeiDou ground-based augmentation stations, BeiDou's high-precision positioning services will gradually cover multiple fields such as agricultural disaster warning, transportation, power, and environment.
In East Timor, agricultural machinery using BeiDou technology can perform precise sowing, fertilizing, and harvesting operations, adapting to local rice and corn production needs, effectively improving farming efficiency.
In Central Asia, the "Sarez Lake Usoy Dam BeiDou Deformation Monitoring Application" system has become a landmark project of Sino-foreign joint construction of the "Digital Silk Road"; the BeiDou pilot application project in Kazakhstan covers forest fire prevention, geological disasters, and water resources monitoring, helping disaster prevention and mitigation through the construction of technical platforms and improvement of infrastructure.
In Africa, more than 30 African countries such as Nigeria, Tunisia, and Senegal are building BeiDou CORS systems, providing high-precision positioning services for local water conservancy, transportation, agriculture, and meteorological monitoring.
In Europe, BeiDou laser dual-camera receivers can ensure efficient and accurate data acquisition for surveyors in complex terrain and signal blocking environments; BeiDou intelligent lawn mowers have been adapted to various grassland scenarios in Germany, France, Italy, and Sweden, significantly improving mowing efficiency by planning more reasonable work routes.
Ahsan Iqbal, Minister of Planning and Special Tasks of Pakistan, stated at the BeiDou Summit that in today's world, positioning, navigation, and timing systems are "invisible" important infrastructure. The BeiDou system has improved logistics in Pakistan and reduced transportation costs, ensuring smooth transportation at ports such as Gwadar and Karachi.
BeiDou "renewal" helps create a better future
At the BeiDou Summit, a humanoid robot called "Qinglong Pro" equipped with a "time-space computing backpack" became the star of the event. Thanks to the dynamic centimeter-level precise positioning and multi-model collaborative reasoning capabilities given by the backpack, this robot can flexibly apply to outdoor fields such as logistics delivery, park navigation, and independent inspection. This innovative product that has attracted attention is the result of a joint development between Qianxun Positioning and the National and Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center.
Many innovative achievements unveiled at the summit show that the deep integration of BeiDou with artificial intelligence is triggering technological changes in more fields. During the concurrent "Time and Space Intelligence Empowerment Development Forum," six innovative achievements in the BeiDou time and space intelligence field were concentratedly released, covering key areas such as low-carbon transportation, oil and gas pipelines, extreme communication, and emergency rescue, comprehensively demonstrating the trend of BeiDou technology's transition from "perceiving location" to "understanding scenes."
Under the pull of market development, the BeiDou system continues to achieve breakthroughs along the path of technological iteration. According to the national overall plan, China will complete the next generation of the BeiDou system by 2035 and has clarified the schedule for phased implementation: completing key technology breakthroughs by 2025, launching the pilot experimental satellite around 2027, starting the launch of network satellites by 2029, and completing the system construction by 2035. Industry insiders believe that this means BeiDou will move from providing global coverage to building a precise, credible, and intelligent PNT integrated system, and its service scope will further expand to high-dynamic application scenarios such as low-altitude economy and intelligent connected transportation.
"The next generation of BeiDou will achieve higher precision in positioning and timing," said Li Jiancheng, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and President of Central South University. The next generation of BeiDou is not only a positioning system but also supports the digital economy, smart society, and core infrastructure, and will serve deep space exploration, including the moon, Mars, and various deep space missions.
Xu Ran predicted that in the future, based on centimeter-level or even millimeter-level high-precision positioning capabilities, BeiDou will empower the development of fully automated intelligent connected logistics. From无人驾驶 trucks at ports to unmanned delivery vehicles, the entire supply chain will operate autonomously, safely, and efficiently within the precise time and space constructed by BeiDou; "BeiDou + Digital Twin" will build a supply chain "super brain" that is completely synchronized with the physical world, allowing people to simulate and forecast the operation of the supply chain in the virtual world, reshaping the intelligent decision-making paradigm, and achieving a shift in decision-making models from "passive response" to "active intelligent control"; "BeiDou + Internet of Things" will build a smart world where everything is interconnected, and at that time, every product and vehicle will become an intelligent node.
Amidst the deep perception of the future "pulse" of the time and space information industry, many attendees from various countries expressed their expectations for strengthening BeiDou application international cooperation to pursue an open and prosperous future together.
Fomondrazana, Deputy Speaker of the Malagasy National Assembly, said that this summit is an important opportunity to promote the popularization and application of the BeiDou system in participating countries. She eagerly hopes that the new international cooperation framework formed around the BeiDou system will lead to a series of sustainable technology transfer projects, allowing each country to fully incorporate the BeiDou system into its national development strategy according to its own development needs and priorities.
At the BeiDou Summit, China Time and Space Information Group, China Mobile Shanghai Industrial Research Institute, and others jointly initiated the establishment of the "BeiDou Application International Cooperation Alliance." The alliance will gather industrial strengths to promote resource sharing and complementary advantages in various fields, further enhancing the reputation of the "BeiDou of China, the BeiDou of the world, and the first-rate BeiDou."
"The BeiDou signals in Pakistan will convert resources into food on the dining table, into faster ambulances, into safer roads, and into more resilient communities," said Ahsan Iqbal. The BeiDou signals received by Pakistan are not only signals from space, but also signals representing hope, prosperity, and human common progress.
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