JD.com, the second-largest e-commerce firm in China, has announced the rollout of a new product delivery system that is powered by robots. These autonomous rolling machines can bring products up to a 5-kilometer radius from the company's main warehouse and are run using artificial intelligence.
The company decided to expand its labor force to include machines in a bid to address increasing labor shortages and wages in the logistics industry. The launch of AI robots comes just a few months after the company unveiled its first drone delivery system to bring an order of Shanghai hairy crabs to a customer. JD.com started with 20 robots at the end of November near it Changsha base in the Hunan Province writes the Nikkei Asian Review.
The robots are four-wheeled and are equipped with sensors and cameras. About the size of a regular golf cart, it can move up to 20 kilometers per hour. Its AI enables it to avoid obstructions, obey road signals, and even skirt traffic. Each one has 22 compartments to carry items that need to be delivered. Customers are given a password or asked to undergo face authentication to verify that it is indeed their order. If the customer is not home or is unable to remove the item within the set time, the robot moves on to its next delivery and that customer's item is rescheduled.
The Changsha warehouse reportedly can delivery as many as 2,000 packages daily. All robot movements are monitored using a computer system in real-time.
In an earlier report by Forbes in April 2018, when JD.com only envisioned rolling out a robot workforce, Richard Liu , chairman and CEO of JD.com, revealed that the company has set up a research hub in Silicon Valley for its JD-X robotics arm and was ready to invest as much as US$4.5 billion to construct its AI facility in Guandong. The goal was to create a "people-free warehouse" that also uses AI tech to price products and manage inventory
