On June 16, the first integrated indoor and outdoor “robot plus” AI delivery solution in China officially started its pilot operation at the headquarters of China Postal Express & Logistics Co. Ltd., marking that China Post has radically upgraded its “robot plus” intelligent delivery solution.

The intelligent delivery solution launched by China Post relies on the combination of unmanned vehicles outdoors and robots indoors to achieve intensive sharing, mass collaboration and real-time dispatch, thus constructing an integrated indoor and outdoor unmanned distribution mode, and developing a “one plus X” last-mile logistics network featuring AI transport capacity sharing. Such a solution can be applied to door-to-door delivery in commercial buildings and large campuses to improve the utilization rate of smart devices such as unmanned vehicles and robots. With this solution, the efficiency of last mile delivery is over 50 percent higher than that of the traditional way, and over 30 percent higher than that of other intelligent delivery solutions. During the commissioning period from March 15 to May 9, the daily delivery volume was about 30 orders with a delivery time of about 5 minutes each, saving a total of about 3,910 minutes in delivery.

With L4 driverless capacity, the outdoor unmanned vehicles piloted by China Post adopt the industry-leading modular design separating the vehicles and the lockers (the lockers can be tailored according to the needs of service scenarios). At the same time, based on the multi-sensor fusion technology with spatio-temporal alignment, the unmanned vehicles can switch indoor and outdoor high-precision positioning seamlessly, and possess five-fold protection monitoring on the basis of laser radar, ultrasonic sensor, target identification camera, emergency button and flexible anti-collision strip, and three operation modes including autonomous driving, on-site remote-control driving, and remote parallel driving. The indoor delivery robots are equipped with functional units for perception and cognition, as well as units for positioning and navigation. When applying to indoor elevator AIoT, the robots integrate elevator logic internally, which enables efficient and autonomous one-click elevator calling, IoT with electronic doors and gates, and intelligent opening and closing doors when approaching the target. The robots can also avoid obstacles autonomously in buildings, and their capabilities to pass through narrow space and bumps are at the forefront of the industry. During collection and delivery operations, the robots can interact with customers via texts and phone calls, to provide customers with a better delivery service experience.

The pilot operation of the integrated indoor and outdoor “robot plus” AI delivery solution is an attempt that China Post has made to accelerate its digital transition and create new advantages in digital intelligence. In the future, China Post will continue to optimize this AI delivery solution to provide integrated and full-process intelligent delivery service for such premises as commercial buildings at the business districts, government offices and college campuses. China Post will promote the pilot operation in several provinces, and constantly optimize and upgrade the solution according to customer experience and service scenarios. It will seek to build China Post “robot plus” operation centers in office and commercial buildings, and make them unified hubs for all delivery services to all customers inside the buildings. It will further explore the business model of “robot plus new retail” in buildings to extend its tenet of serving the people, thus striving to meet the people’s demands for postal service in pursuing their better lives.