At Shushan premises of Hefei Mail Center in Anhui province, 80 small white vehicle-like robots are shuttling back and forth on the sorting platform. Each carrying a small tray on top and equipped with first-class “driving skills”, they perform a series of actions freely and smoothly: waiting in line for mail items, making turns, braking abruptly when encountering other vehicles, or flipping the trays to unload the items, thereby enabling the sorting platform to operate in an orderly manner. These highly attractive robots are the “new recruits” of Hefei Mail Center. “Postal Mini White” is the nickname given by the postal workers on the site to these robot colleagues.

Running at a speed of two meters per second, Postal Mini Whites work in conjunction with the 3D sorting machine, increasing sorting accuracy to 99.99 percent. Besides, they have super standby capability and are able to run four hours with 15 minutes of charging. During the Double 11 shopping spree in 2024, the “Postal Mini White” intelligent sorting system was officially put into use, covering an area of 300 square meters. With a double-deck platform, 80 intelligent sorting robots and 130 chutes, this system can sort 5,400 pieces per hour, effectively enhancing the processing capacity of light and flat items and small packets at Shushan premises.

Unlike these “new recruits”, the 300 little yellow robots (nicknamed Mini Yellow) at Yaohai outbound premises of Hefei Mail Center are real “veterans”. Officially put into operation since 2017, this is the ninth year that the Mini Yellows have been working in the postal enterprise.

The “Mini Yellow” intelligent sorting system consists of 10 packet feeders and 135 chutes, and mainly sorts mail items below 5 kg, with a sorting efficiency of 12,000 pieces per hour and a daily mail processing volume of about 100,000 pieces. The magic carpet where the Mini Yellows are located serves as a map. upon receiving instructions, the Mini Yellows will identify their respective targets according to the information on the shipping labels and the chip-based location, and transport the packages to designated locations via optimal routes to complete their sorting tasks. Since it was put to use, the Mini Yellow intelligent sorting system has undertaken 50 percent of the small packet processing tasks at Yaohai outbound premises, saving more than 60 percent of manpower and making great contributions to efficiency increase in peak seasons every year.

Recently, at Shushan premises, such a view has become common: An unmanned tractor, chanting cheerful melodies, pulls a heavy roll container tirelessly through the site. When reaching the designated place, it automatically unhooks the roll container and hooks another one to start next task. This is the unmanned transportation that has been piloted at Shushan premises since November 2024.

The pilot of unmanned tractors is an active exploration Hefei Mail Center has made in developing unmanned scenarios to connect the disrupted links on the site. The tractors have achieved L4 autonomous driving through multi-modal fusion positioning, fusion perception and planning with LiDAR and visual sensors. They can also perform functions such as autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance and fault self-diagnosis in a closed site via 5G communications. Each unmanned tractor can transport an average of 13,000 mail items per day, which can reduce labor costs equivalent to two drivers.