Skip to main content
https://www.highperformancecpmgate.com/rgeesizw1?key=a9d7b2ab045c91688419e8e18a006621

JD.com, Meituan and Neolix to test autonomous deliveries on Beijing public roads

People in a Beijing suburb will begin to see autonomous delivery mini-vans across their neighborhood, moving cautiously alongside human delivery riders belting down the streets.

Beijing has greenlighted JD.com, Meituan, and Neolix to trial self-driving delivery vehicles on designated public roads in the Yizhuang Development Area, an economic and technological growth pilot initiated by the municipal government of the capital city, according to an announcement made by local authorities at a mobility conference on Tuesday. Yizhuang has aggressively rolled out 5G coverage in part to prepare the infrastructure for autonomous driving ventures.

All three companies are using dainty box-on-wheels vehicles similar to those of Nuro to shuffle goods around. Three-year-old Neolix, backed by Chinese electric vehicle startup Li Auto, focuses on making self-driving vehicles for retail, surveillance and other city services, while both JD.com and Meituan are tech heavyweights that find unmanned delivery increasingly important to their existing core business.

Meituan’s self-driving delivery vehicle / Photo: Meituan via WeChat

Online retailer JD.com hires its own in-house delivery staff while Meituan relies on a national network of riders to bring restaurant takeout to customers. Both have been working on autonomous driving technologies internally in recent years and are also testing small fleets of delivery drones in China.

Neolix will place 150 delivery robots on Beijing roads by June. JD.com declined to disclose its deployment number. Meituan can’t be immediately reached for comment.

At the Tuesday event, authorities from the Beijing pilot zone also laid out rules for operating zero-occupant delivery vehicles in the area. The robots are categorized as “non-motor vehicles,” which suggests they will be moving next to bicycles and electric scooters instead of faster-moving cars. Road conditions in Chinese cities are often much more complicated than in the United States, even on sidewalks and bike lanes thanks to unpredictable pedestrians, unleashed pets, and reckless scooter riders.

Importantly, the rules also stipulate that the robots need to have safety drivers “on the spot and remotely.”

Neolix’s delivery robot / Photo: Neolix via WeChat

JD.com says its technology allows every remote safety driver to monitor up to 50 operating delivery robots simultaneously. Its vehicles will carry packages from logistics centers and supermarkets to nearby office buildings, residential complexes and school campuses. Customers will then fetch their order directly from the van using a pick-up code sent to them through a text message ahead of time.

Neolix’s vehicles in the pilot area, in comparison, act more like mobile vending machines peddling snacks and lunchboxes to workers around office complexes. Users can place their order on a little screen attached to the robot, pay by a QR code and get their warm bento or ice cream instantaneously.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp steps back from board director role

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp is relinquishing his role as a board director and switching to board observer — where he says he’ll focus on product strategy for the ride hailing giant. Camp made the announcement in a short Medium post in which he writes of his decade at Uber: “I’ve learned a lot, and realized that I’m most helpful when focused on product strategy & design, and this is where I’d like to focus going forward.” “I will continue to work with Dara [Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO] and the product and technology leadership teams to brainstorm new ideas, iterate on plans and designs, and continue to innovate at scale,” he adds. “We have a strong and diverse team in place, and I’m confident everyone will navigate well during these turbulent times.” The Canadian billionaire entrepreneur signs off by saying he’s looking forward to helping Uber “brainstorm the next big idea”. Camp hasn’t been short of ideas over his career in tech. He’s the co-founder of the web 2.0 recommendatio
Post a Comment
Read more

Drone crash near kids leads Swiss Post and Matternet to suspend autonomous deliveries

A serious crash by a delivery drone in Switzerland have grounded the fleet and put a partnership on ice. Within a stone’s throw of a school, the incident raised grim possibilities for the possibilities of catastrophic failure of payload-bearing autonomous aerial vehicles. The drones were operated by Matternet as part of a partnership with the Swiss Post (i.e. the postal service), which was using the craft to dispatch lab samples from one medical center for priority cases. As far as potential applications of drone delivery, it’s a home run — but twice now the craft have crashed, first with a soft landing and the second time a very hard one. The first incident, in January, was the result of a GPS hardware error; the drone entered a planned failback state and deployed its emergency parachute, falling slowly to the ground. Measures were taken to improve the GPS systems. The second failure in May, however, led to the drone attempting to deploy its parachute again, only to sever the line
Post a Comment
Read more

ProtonMail logged IP address of French activist after order by Swiss authorities

ProtonMail , a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn’t log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation — in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn’t cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users. For the past year, a group of people have taken over a handful of commercial premises and apartments near Place Sainte Marthe in Paris. They want to fight against gentrification, real estate speculation, Airbnb and high-end restaurants. While it started as a local conflict, it quickly became a symbolic campaign. They attracted newspaper headlines when they started occupying prem
Post a Comment
Read more