Frontline | Wuhan has built China's first full-coverage low-altitude remote sensing monitoring network covering the entire territory of a megacity, with 146 UAV airports forming the "Smart Urban Eye" system.

Text by Zhang Ziyi

Edited by Yuan Silai

The low-altitude economy is evolving from aircraft manufacturing to urban governance.

On July 29, Wuhan Surveying and Mapping Research Institute, in collaboration with DJI Enterprise, released the construction achievements of the "Urban Smart Eye" low-altitude UAV remote sensing monitoring system. At present, Wuhan has built 146 unmanned airports, which basically realize a 5-minute UAV response across the city except for no-fly zones, making it the first megacity in China to achieve full-coverage low-altitude UAV remote sensing monitoring network.

It is understood that this "Urban Smart Eye" system consists of a low-altitude UAV monitoring network, a cloud control platform, an AI algorithm library and industry applications. Relying on a high-precision low-altitude airspace spatiotemporal information grid, it can realize capabilities such as intelligent airport scheduling, automatic route generation, and intelligent obstacle avoidance, and support automated flight modes including "one-click direct flight", "relay continuous flight" and "temporary diversion flight".

Compared with traditional UAV inspection, the value of low-altitude infrastructure is not just about increasing the number of UAVs, but building a unified low-altitude operation network at the urban level. According to Wuhan's current deployment, the 146 airports are shared by multiple government departments and scheduled through a unified platform. While realizing the sharing of hardware resources, the data and permissions of all departments are managed independently to avoid redundant construction.

At present, "Urban Smart Eye" has served 16 government departments in Wuhan, and is gradually applied in multiple scenarios such as traffic management, ecological environmental protection, forest fire prevention, and urban operation management.

Among them, traffic governance is one of the most maturely implemented applications at present. Wuhan traffic police have incorporated UAVs into their daily duty system to carry out automatic inspection and remote disposal in scenarios such as traffic accidents, road congestion, and illegal parking patrols. For example, in the handling of elevated road traffic accidents, UAVs can arrive at the scene at the first time, guide drivers to take photos and move vehicles through remote voice announcements, and simultaneously retain image evidence. Since its deployment in August last year, UAVs have participated in the disposal of 400 elevated road traffic accidents in total, of which about 30% of the accidents completed on-site disposal through remote guidance without the need for police officers to arrive at the scene.

Ecological governance is also an important application direction for UAVs. Relying on low-altitude inspections, Wuhan's ecological environment department carries out regular inspections of scenarios such as sewage outlets, river and lake shorelines, dust and exhaust gas emissions, and combines AI to automatically identify water body status and generate standardized analysis reports to improve inspection efficiency. In terms of forest fire prevention, UAVs undertake tasks such as patrol, fire verification and post-disaster assessment, realizing the "integrated normal and emergency" management from daily inspection to emergency response.

At the same time, the city-wide UAV network has been connected to Wuhan's urban operation "One Network for Unified Management" platform, integrated with 3D city maps and operation data such as water level, air quality and bridge conditions, becoming an important aerial perception capability for urban operation management, providing support for major event security, emergency command and urban operation monitoring.

As an important part of low-altitude infrastructure, DJI Docks have been continuously upgraded in recent years. From launching unmanned operations in 2022 to the latest generation of products that realize all-weather, all-domain and whole-process automated operation, automated airports have gradually become urban low-altitude infrastructure.

As the low-altitude economy enters the stage of large-scale construction from demonstration application, the low-altitude infrastructure model explored by Wuhan featuring unified construction and multi-department sharing also provides a new practical sample for megacities on how to build low-altitude public infrastructure.