Beijing (Reuters) - More than 1,000 robots will join Chinese delivery giants Such as Alibaba, Meituan and JD.com as the epidemic increases demand for contactless services in the coming year.
Encouraged by falling robot manufacturing costs, the companies expect to operate more than 2,000 robots by 2022, a roughly fourfold increase from today, executives from both companies said.
In China, millions of couriers still deliver packages for less than 3 yuan ($0.47), but as labor shortages worsened due to the pandemic, companies began exploring the use of drones or box robots on wheels as early as 2013.
Beijing has also asked delivery companies to ensure breaks for couriers to meet growing demand and deadlines.
"The COVID-19 pandemic has given a huge boost to the robot launch plan," said Xia Huaxia, meituan's chief scientist.
The food delivery giant launched its robot service in February 2020, ahead of its planned launch at the end of the year, when the number of infections in Beijing was high.
E-commerce giant JD.com has also put forward plans to launch robot services, said Kong Qi, chief scientist of the company's autonomous driving department. The service was scheduled to launch in Beijing in June 2020, but began to be used in Wuhan after the central Chinese city was locked down in February.
We want people and cars to work better together, rather than cars replacing people. It's just the most boring part of the delivery man's job that we're going to try to replace."
Limitations and Benefits
Still, human delivery workers outnumber robots, which have limitations such as the inability to climb stairs. In addition, due to speed limits and road conditions, robots are only allowed to drive on certain routes, such as residential areas and school campuses.
Robots also tend to be used to deliver less time-sensitive products, such as packages, rather than food.
"In office areas where people order a lot of food and parcels, efficiency is low, but the capacity of vehicles is limited," said Zhang Ji, 25, as she picked up a package delivered by a self-driving car near her Beijing office.
But proponents support the robots' long-term benefits, such as reducing the cost of last-mile deliveries. Researchers at the University of Michigan say fully or partially automated vehicles can reduce delivery costs by 10 to 40 percent in cities.
As of September, alibaba said it had delivered more than 1 million orders for the "last Mile" logistics truck to more than 200,000 consumers. The company operates more than 200 robots and plans to reach 1,000 by March next year and 10,000 in the next three years.
The cost has gone down
Wang Gang, Alibaba's vice president in charge of autonomous driving, said the cost of building robots has fallen, mainly because lidar sensors have become cheaper. Lidar sensors can help measure distances and draw images around the vehicle.
Alibaba and JD.com say the cost of making robots is less than Rmb250,000 ($38,662) and falling.
Jd.com, which currently operates about 200 robots, plans to expand that number to about 1,000 by the end of 2021.
Xia said Meituan expects the cost of manufacturing robots to be about 400,000 yuan this year and 600,000 yuan in 2020.
By 2025, The cost of Meituan's robots will be less than 200,000 yuan, and by then, the industry will see the large-scale application of more than 10,000 such robots, Xia said.
Meituan currently has about 100 delivery robots.
Delivery companies in other countries are also testing robots. Russia's Yandex and online food ordering company GrubHub plan to start using driverless robots to deliver food on US college campuses. To read more
"I hope robots will be widely used soon, because it will make our lives more convenient... Pan Hongju, 28, is a programmer in Beijing.
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