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China: Drone Delivery Flights Carrying Seafood Begins Operation in Shenzhen

A drone deliv­ery route fly­ing seafood from Nan’ao Shuangy­ong Pier in the east of Shen­zhen to the city’s Long­gang Dis­trict in south Chi­na began last week, reports en.ce.cn. 

The drones take off with up to a 20 kilo­gram load of seafood which is then deliv­ered to local couri­ers who sell it on to cus­tomers. Prod­ucts deliv­ered include fresh­ly-caught crabs, lob­ster, all types of fish, prawns, cray­fish, clams, oys­ters and mus­sels. Seafood store work­ers place the items in a strong red bag and then load it on to a drone that oper­ates for the couri­er SF Express (see images).

A sub­sidi­airy, SF UAS, became the first in Chi­na to obtain a license for tri­alling deliv­ery drones back in Jan­u­ary 2022. By Sep­tem­ber of that year, the com­pa­ny had estab­lished 66 dif­fer­ent routes cov­er­ing areas in Long­gang, Nan­shan, Luo­hu, Longhua and Ping­shan. 

The fol­low­ing year, the com­pa­ny began test­ing com­mer­cial oper­a­tions over long dis­tances in Yulin city and oth­er areas sit­u­at­ed in the country’s north­west. The pilot area was then expand­ed to a wider region of Chi­na with the aim of build­ing an air trans­port net­work with SF Express con­sist­ing of large manned car­go planes, Unmanned Aer­i­al Vehi­cles and end-deliv­ery drones.

These suc­cess­ful tri­als have now led to the seafood oper­a­tion in Shen­zhen, a city well-versed and used to drone trans­porta­tion.

For anoth­er com­pa­ny, deliv­ery giant Meitu­an, has been employ­ing these craft exten­sive­ly, fly­ing food and gen­er­al prod­ucts between sky­scrap­ers to spe­cial kiosks around the city since 2022. The com­pa­ny made more than 100,000 deliv­er­ies that year alone. Today, for many Shen­zhen res­i­dents and ven­dors, deliv­ery by drone is no longer a nov­el­ty, but part of a dai­ly rou­tine.

Meitu­an launch­es its drones from five deliv­ery hubs, includ­ing a rooftop on a large shop­ping mall. Usu­al­ly, ten or more craft are locat­ed there with two or three either tak­ing off or land­ing at the same time.

The work­flow is a mix of human and auto­mat­ed labour. Once the com­pa­ny gains an order (cus­tomers order spe­cif­ic items from an app), a run­ner (human) goes to the restau­rants, locat­ed in the shop­ping mall, to pick up the food and brings it to the launch­pad. The run­ner then places the items in a stan­dard­ised card­board box, weighs it to make sure it’s not too heavy, seals the box, and hands it on to a dif­fer­ent work­er who places this under a drone and waits for it to lock in. 

Mao Yin­ian, the Direc­tor of drone deliv­ery ser­vices at Meitu­an, explained to MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review, “Every­thing after that is high­ly auto­mat­ed. The drones’ move­ments are con­trolled by a cen­tral algo­rithm where the routes are pre­de­ter­mined. You can know in advance, at every pre­cise sec­ond, where each drone will be and how fast its speed is, so the cus­tomers can expect the arrival time with a devi­a­tion of two sec­onds, instead of three min­utes or even ten min­utes from tra­di­tion­al deliv­ery.”

Shen­zhen Drone Deliv­ery Kiosk (Cred­it: Meitu­an)

The com­pa­ny has a cen­tralised con­trol room in Shen­zhen, where staff can take con­trol of a craft in an emer­gency. There are now more than a hun­dred drones that can be deployed for deliv­er­ies in the city. On aver­age, one oper­a­tor is watch­ing ten at the same time.

While in the West, drone deliv­ery of food, drink and health­care prod­ucts is led by com­pa­nies like Wing, Zipline, Mat­ter­net, Fly­trex and Wing­copter, Chi­na is ahead of this com­pe­ti­tion, where the city of Shen­zhen is a major tour de force.

(News Source: http://en.people.cn/www.technologyreview.com)

(Shen­zhen Images: Xin­hua News/Mao Siqian)

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