(Yicai) Sept. 18 -- Fulongma Group’s shares rose by their daily trading limit after the Chinese supplier of environmental sanitation equipment announced a partnership with Huawei Technologies to develop autonomous driving systems for sanitation vehicles.

Fulongma [SHA: 603686] surged 10 percent to close at CNY15.47 (USD2.31) per share in Shanghai today. The stock is still down about 46 percent this year.

Huawei Cloud Computing Technology will develop a self-driving system exclusively for Fulongma’s sanitation vehicles, the Longyan-based company announced late yesterday, citing a three-year contract under which Fulongma will pay total service fees of CNY200 million (USD29.6 million).

The system will include cloud-based and vehicle-end software, as well as intelligent hardware solutions, aiming to expand the use of autonomous driving technology in Fulongma’s sanitation vehicle products and strengthen its digital and intelligent capabilities.

The partnership will also encompass research and development of intelligent vehicle upgrades, drive-by-wire optimization, and cloud adaptation.

Fulongma said the tie-up represents an important strategic initiative in the intelligent upgrade of its sanitation equipment business. It has already made inroads in the field, developing unmanned products, conducting demonstration operations, and generating initial commercial sales. First-half revenue from the business was nearly CNY5 million (USD738,880), up from about CNY9.9 million (USD1.5 million) for the whole of last year.

Huawei Cloud will lead the adaptation and validation of self-driving algorithm software for Fulongma’s 3-ton and 6-ton payload vehicle models in dry-sweeping and sweeping-and-washing uses. The pair will seek to establish a closed-loop data process, enabling incremental training of the models and algorithms and continuous iteration based on operational data.

Huawei Cloud will also help Fulongma enhance its R&D capabilities autonomous-driving solutions and in laying the technical and operational groundwork for the future commercialization of unmanned sanitation vehicles.

The collaboration does not involve any transfer of technology. Instead, Fulongma will receive a non-exclusive, general-use permit from Huawei, which cannot be sublicensed or redistributed, and the firm will not be required to pay any additional licensing fees for using the R&D results.

Shenzhen-based Huawei will own the models trained on Fulongma's data, while Fulongma will be able to access the results by subscribing to Huawei Cloud's public cloud services for autonomous driving in sanitation applications.

By combining their respective strengths, the two parties aim to speed up Fulongma’s development of end-to-end self-driving capabilities and facilitate the launch of autonomous models with advanced self-driving features. Fulongma expects this to strengthen the competitiveness of its products and enhance their differentiation in the market.

The partnership will also establish mechanisms to support joint R&D and joint marketing. The two companies will work together to accelerate technology iteration and product commercialization while expanding the market for smart sanitation equipment.

Editor: Futura Costaglione