JD to replace humans with robots in on-campus parcel delivery

JD's unmanned small-sized driverless vehicle is pictured on June 18, 2017. China's B2C e-commerce giant JD.com plans to hand over its parcel delivery in more than 100 universities in Beijing "all to robots" starting next month, said its founder Liu Qiangdong on Monday. "I hope one day, my brothers do not need to go to the street to deliver goods under the burning sun, or bracing the cold wind or the heavy snow or the smog and they could just sit in offices, monitoring millions of drones, delivery robots, 800 logistics centers, tens of thousands of driverless vehicles and 20,000 to 30,000 unmanned delivery centers. "This made our inventory turnover days of these 530 SKU 30-plus days and we firmly believe we would have 10 million SKU and 800 logistics worldwide in the next three years and we hope the turnover days could be under 20," said Liu. "We hope, within three years, our heavy drones can fly as far as 500 to 1,000 kilometers and can carry one to two tons of goods and in the long term, hopefully, each could carry 20-ton goods," said Liu.