Design of a Beijing-Zhangjiakou high-speed train. (Photo/Xinhua)

The world’s first 350 km/h self-driving bullet train will run on the Beijing-Zhangjiakou intercity railway, the country’s top railway operator said Wednesday.

Lu Dongfu, general manager of the country’s state railway operator China Railway told a work conference on Wednesday that the new system will start operation in 2022 in order to serve Beijing and Zhangjiakou in north China’s Hebei province—the two host cities of the 2022 Winter Olympics, with a top speed of up to 350 km/h.

Tests of the automated high-speed system were carried out successfully on the line linking Beijing and Shenyang in northeast China’s Liaoning province from July to September 2018, with total trial mileage of more than 186,000 kilometers.

The engineer revealed that during the 94 days of testing the train ran smoothly and passed all tests with an accumulated mileage of 186,397 kilometers, marking a major breakthrough by China in autonomous train technology.

According to previous reports, the new self-driving high-speed rail system integrates various technologies such as cloud computing, IoT, AI, and big data. The rail system infrastructure will include facial recognition for check-in, robot porters, and other intelligent services.

“Technology has allows us to use the automatic train operation (ATO) system on trains, in fact, many subways already use ATO,” a senior engineer from the China Academy of Railway Sciences Corp told Science and Technology Daily.

According to the engineer, China Railway has tested ATO on two 200 km/h intercity railways in the Pearl River Delta of southern China, a first of its kind worldwide.

“After adopting ATO, the train will automatically depart from the platform, run between stations, adjust its arrival time, stop, and open its doors. The driver only needs to press a button to start it,” the engineer said.