When the drones sent express delivery and take-outs were still in a promotional video, China’s take-away industry was ahead of the world. At this year’s World Unmanned Systems Conference, the hungry take-out drone “E7” (Chinese name: Wing) made its debut publicly.
The E7 has a maximum flight speed of 65 km/h, a maximum load of 6 kg and a full-load cruising range of 20 km. Is the third generation of UAV products developed internally, and the E7 has reached the practical application level in various core indicators. The trailer box that is mounted is specially made of air column material and has a weight of only 485 grams. It is the lightest in the world’s similar take-away boxes, but its volume can reach 20 liters.
At the beginning of 2016, when you were hungry, you put forward an innovative concept inside the “future logistics” strategy. E7 is one of the “big moves” of this strategy. The background of the “Future Logistics” strategy is that China’s real-time distribution industry is about to enter the 3.0 stage. As the originator of the take-away field, I am hungry and have experienced three stages in the real-time distribution industry in China:
In the first stage, the real-time distribution capacity is mainly based on the self-distribution of the merchants, in a state of fragmentation and isolation, and the efficiency level is extremely low;
In the second stage, the real-time distribution platform emerged, and the organizational capacity and crowdsourcing capacity based on unified planning became the mainstream of the market, and the efficiency was improved;
In the third stage, in order to adapt to the explosive growth of demand for real-time distribution, the platform seizes the technological revolutionary opportunities of artificial intelligence, big data, and intelligent hardware. The main development momentum of real-time distribution has shifted from manpower expansion to technological innovation, and the efficiency has continued to increase substantially.
Hungry said: At present, China’s real-time distribution industry is in the transition from the second phase to the third phase. Hungry, the core of the “future logistics” strategy is to create an instant delivery system based on user experience, innovative technology as the driving force, and intelligent hardware in 3-5 years, to promote the real-time distribution industry to complete the third stage. Transformation. The intelligent dispatching system that has a single-time delivery time of 30 minutes, the industry’s first hot and cold separation thermostat take-away box, etc., are all hungry. The innovations that have been incubated under the guidance of the “Future Logistics” strategy in the past year.
In order to develop cutting-edge distribution technology more specifically, Hungry has also established the “Hungry π Business Unit” as the R&D department of “Future Logistics”. The first project the team received was the development of a hungry drone distribution system. After a lot of research and demonstration and simulation tests, at present, Hungry has formed a set of UAV distribution processes and methods based on the same city logistics. As of September 2017, the Hungry UAV has accumulated thousands of test flights, and has successfully tackled many key technologies such as transportation functions, flight performance, load performance, environmental adaptability and electromagnetic compatibility. After the E7, related research and development is still continuing, and a new generation of better-performing Hungry UAVs is expected to be put into test in April next year.
To undertake the logistics of large areas, it is the role that drones will play in the future real-time distribution system. At present, land transportation undertakes the logistics of real-time distribution of all lines, but subject to the reality of traffic jams, traffic lights, and speed limits of electric vehicles, land transportation efficiency will reach its limit in the foreseeable future. Expanding capacity and optimizing intelligent dispatching will help land transportation to further break the limit, but “land-air combined with three-dimensional transportation” with lower development cost and higher human efficiency is also necessary.
Both the data simulation and the actual test show that under certain conditions (such as the distance from the starting point to the destination is long, the number of orders in the same direction is large), the drone takes the trunk line of the distribution point A to B, and the rider assumes From the meal point to the distribution point A, the distribution point B to the destination branch transportation, the delivery time and cost are significantly reduced compared with the pure land transportation. Long-distance, high-density order delivery will be an important application scenario for UAV logistics in the future.
Hungry, co-founder Deng Wei said that he would like to thank Shanghai ZF for its support for the development of drones. A year ago, when you were hungry, the time-to-time delivery time was the first to break through the 30-minute industry watershed. With the hungry drone distribution technology becoming more and more mature, the 30-minute limit value will be rewritten, users will Enjoy a more ultimate service experience.
Deng Wei also said that instant delivery is a new format created by the Internet, and “labor-intensive industries” should not be its label. It is believed that under the driving of the wave of innovation and technology, in the future, real-time distribution can truly transform from a labor-intensive industry to a technology-intensive industry, so that every instant distribution practitioner can play more value and make the instant distribution profession more dignified.
