Meituan-Dianping to test autonomous delivery this year for service launch in 2019
The annual session of the China Development Forum (CDF) 2018 is taking place from March 24 to 26, 2018, with “China in the New Era” as its theme. Meituan-Dianping CEO Xing Wang presented at the “New Lifestyles in the AI Era” session.
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Wang said that Meituan-Dianping, an online platform for ordering food and booking movies and restaurants, has become the largest online service platform in the world. Meituan-Dianping provides services to six million of China’s seven million businesses, including ride hailing, movie tickets, hotels, karaoke television and more than 200 other categories. Meituan-Dianping is also using artificial intelligence to upgrade its products and services.
Meituan-Dianping provides IT systems, financial services and other services integrating AI and big data to traditional industries including hotels and tourism.
According to Wang, Meituan-Dianping’s order volume is currently more than 18 million per day, becoming the world’s largest on-demand delivery platform. Through artificial intelligence, Meituan-Dianping has developed a smart distribution system. Wang said that two years ago, Meituan-Dianping began to explore the use of autonomous distribution vehicles for unmanned delivery. Meituan-Dianping has applied for more than 60 patents related to autonomous vehicle technologies. He also disclosed that Meituan-Dianping has piloted unmanned distribution in Joy City, a shopping mall in Beijing. Meituan-Dianping will conduct trials of unmanned delivery this year and will officially implement this service in 2019.
“Many breakthrough technologies, such as artificial intelligence, initially served only a few people. But Meituan-Dianping believes that science and technology is universal, and that the fundamental purpose of scientific and technological innovation is to serve the public. Our vision is that through scientific and technological innovation, integration between online and offline as well as AI improvements, Meituan-Dianping can serve a billion people every day, bring benefit to everyone, and help people eat better and lead better lives.” Wang concluded.
