Large Chinese webshop develops drone for delivering goods of one ton
JD.com, one of China’s largest online retailers, has announced plans to develop drones capable of delivering goods weighing one ton or more. The drones are intended to be used for long-distance deliveries.
The company has said the drones are being tested on a network to deliver orders in China’s northern province of Shaanxi. The drones are intended to deliver consumer goods to remote areas and take farm produce to various cities on the way back. The company has not disclosed further details about the drones.
The drones will be part of a network with a radius of about 300 kilometers, which includes hundreds of routes and landing sites. According to JD.com, the partnership with the province will boost economic development in this area as more high-tech jobs will be created by the arrival of the delivery network.
JD.com started delivering orders via drones back in 2016. This involved about twenty fixed routes, but by the end of 2017 there should be about a hundred, spread across the country. The thirty drones that are used for this fly from a distribution center to a landing platform, where an employee brings the package to the address of the orderer. This mainly concerns deliveries to remote areas.
This model deviates slightly from Amazon’s plans. This company began testing drones that deliver packages to customers in Cambridge, England, at the end of December. The packages were delivered directly to the customers, but these are goods of a few kilograms and the drones can only fly in good weather.
JD.com is a major competitor of Alibaba and is known for Joybuy.com, among others. The company claims to serve a total of 236 million customers and has a total of 65,000 employees.
A delivery drone from JD.com