Drone delivery and circling the globe 25 times

Food delivery has become an increasingly indispensable part of Chinese daily life.

In 2017, Meituan Takeaway announced that its daily order volume exceeded 10 million for the first time, becoming the world's first 10-million-level daily order delivery platform. In 2023, Meituan's daily orders for takeaway have exceeded 70 million.

In 2022, more than six million riders were busy carrying the takeout needed by customers through the bustling city. And maybe three to five years from now, they will still be busy meals, and on busy city streets, they will have many drones over their heads, delivering alongside them.

This judgment may sound sensational at first, but Meituan has actually been in the field for more than five years and is working to make it a reality.

On July 5, 2023, before the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), the Meituan drone team released the fourth generation of drone products, which have longer delivery distances, faster speeds and lower noise than the previous generation.

Although ordinary people know very little about Meituan drones, because they are currently only carrying out normalized services in specific areas of Shanghai and Shenzhen, in fact, Meituan drones have been constantly updating and iterating since they were officially launched in 2021.

In 2022, drones completed the delivery of 120,000 Meituan orders in the designated area where it was carried out. From 2021 to 2022, the total length of Meituan's drone flight is equivalent to flying around the Earth 25 times.

Through the launch of the fourth-generation drone and the new policy benefit, Meituan hopes to bring drone delivery to the more core of the city, and judges that within three to five years, it can truly achieve large-scale drone delivery.

Drone delivery, is it reliable?

When it comes to drone delivery, many people's first reaction must be, is this reliable?

Under a drone takeaway video with more than 2,000 likes by Caijing Technology, the comment with the highest number of likes is "Walking... A cup of fryer milk tea suddenly falls from the sky, and there may also be pies falling."

This is actually one of the highlights of this conference: how Meituan ensures safety through the design of drones.

According to the statement of the Meituan UAV team, Meituan UAV ensures that the UAV can operate safely in busy cities through a three-level security system:

1 Redundant backup run

The first level of "redundant backup operation" refers to the design of the drone itself. Because the drone mainly comes from the self-developed of the Meituan team, the drone can achieve higher safety than ordinary consumer drones.

The new fourth-generation model is surrounded by 14 multi-modal perception units such as cameras and millimeter-wave radar, and has six-way perception capabilities to assist in dodging and bypassing obstacles.

Communications, batteries, flight control systems, etc. are all designed with dual redundant backups to avoid the risk of a single point of failure.

In an interview with Geek Park in 2021, Mao Nian mentioned that consumer-grade drones may be flown directly into the lake without a magnetic meter, while Meituan drones even if the magnetometer is not calibrated and there are other redundant sensors to help it hover, this situation will not occur. The new generation of drones can achieve that any one of the six rotors fails, and the drone can fly safely.

The new generation of drones has also upgraded its resistance to extreme weather, can operate in moderate rain and snow, and can carry up to seven level winds, which allows Meituan drones to better carry the "canyon effect" formed by air turbulence between buildings when shuttling between buildings.

Meituan's fourth-generation UAV can fly stably in moderate rain, moderate snow, level 6 wind, night and other environments from minus 20 degrees to 50 degrees|Meituan

Meituan UAV even considered the problem of satellite signal jammers: "The aircraft supports 4G, 5G dual SIM and dual-pass and long-distance Wifi communication that can transmit 4 kilometers. The drone also has the ability of visual positioning, even if hackers carry out satellite signal interference, it cannot affect the safe flight of the aircraft." Hu Meng, head of Meituan UAV hardware products, said.

2 Safe Landing

The second level is the ability to make a safe landing. When the drone cannot fly normally, it will implement a safe forced landing. At present, Meituan UAV has planned two forced landing methods for aircraft with human intervention and AI intervention for the aircraft. In the latter case, the AI will directly locate through visual positioning to find the least risk landing area, such as green belts, rooftops, etc.

3 Parachute system

The third level is the parachute landing system. When the drone cannot control the stability of the body, it will automatically turn on the parachute landing system, like a parachute, to slow down the fall speed of the drone.

Meituan UAV said that the parachute landing system developed by Meituan is the first logistics drone in the drone industry that will be used as a standard configuration. Through 18 months and 7 iterations of versions, Meituan's parachute landing system can successfully open a parachute in a variety of environments such as high temperature, low temperature, and solar radiation.

A drone fully loaded with 8.5kg, with the parachute system turned on, has a landing kinetic energy of within 45 joules. (ASTM F3322-18 Standard Specification for Parachute for Small Unmanned Aerial Flight Systems specifies a landing kinetic energy of 69 joules.) ）

Distribution costs have dropped significantly

The 4th generation drone released by Meituan currently has a maximum payload of 2.5kg. When delivering, it is necessary for a delivery person to put the takeaway into a specific takeaway box first, and then the drone will fly automatically, be remotely monitored by the air crew, and take over remotely under special circumstances.

At the terminal, the drone will land on the top of an outdoor cabinet, similar to the current take-out cabinet/delivery cabinet, the takeaway box will automatically unload into the take-out cabinet, and the user will receive a food pickup notification.

Shenzhen Meituan UAV's intelligent airdrop cabinet|Meituan

When fully loaded, Meituan's new generation drone currently has a flight range of 5km, compared to the delivery radius of only 3km. Drones can reach speeds of up to 83km/h and average delivery times of just 15 minutes, compared to 30 minutes for delivery workers.

Although Meituan did not charge higher delivery fees to users who used drone delivery during the test business stage, Mao Yiyian, the head of Meituan's drone management, admitted that the current delivery cost is still higher than that of labor.

Mao judged that if you want large-scale drone delivery, it may take another three to five years. However, at present, the cost of drone delivery is falling "geometrically" every year. "When we scale, the price and labor cost must be basically the same, or the price is only a little higher than the manpower, because the service is better." Mao Nian mentioned in an interview.

The decline in costs may come from the fact that as the drone industry becomes more prosperous, the cost of drones themselves can fall. "We believe that China is the world's largest production country, and there is no shortage of production capacity, production lines and automation levels. When the industry develops to a certain scale, the upstream and downstream of the industry and supporting facilities will invest resources more focused, which will make the cost lower. Mao said.

The decline in costs may also come from an increase in the level of drone automation. Mao mentioned in his speech that when the Meituan drone first landed, it required the air crew to follow the drone on the ground and keep the drone in the field of view before it could be operated. With the advancement of automation, the air crew is all operated remotely. Because only manual confirmation and takeover of operations is used in exceptional circumstances, one aircrew can manage ten drones.

Meituan Shenzhen Low Altitude Operation Management Center|Meituan

"As far as we know, we are probably the only company in the world that can manage ten drones beyond the horizon (meaning that it does not need to be within visual visibility) for one aircrew. Many foreign companies also promote 1:10 or even 1:20, but measuring at the experimental airport is completely different from actually sending orders in the sky." Mao Nian said in an interview.

In the future, by further leveraging AI technology, it may be possible that one aircrew will be able to manage more drones. For example, under the current level of technology, when the drone encounters a new unknown large obstacle, it will hover by itself, waiting for a manual judgment to continue or return. But in the future, through AI technology, drones will be able to judge this on their own, reducing human intervention.

This is also the improvement of the core capabilities that Meituan UAVs need to pay attention to before scaling up in Mao Nianyian's mind. "In the future, if we can really scale, it must be when the cost is very good, maybe a hundred aircrew can supervise the entire city of drones, of course, this number is what I said casually."

The first year of the low-altitude economy

Drone delivery, called by Meituan as a "low-altitude logistics system", in addition to the cost is still higher than manual delivery, the main bottleneck of the current promotion also includes policy uncertainty.

When Meituan UAV first landed in the community for piloting, it needed to constantly communicate and coordinate with the government, the community and other parties to get the opportunity to pilot. In this regard, it has just ushered in a major benefit: just a few days before the press conference, on June 28, 2023, the State Council and the Central Military Commission issued the mainland's first national-level management law related to low-altitude flight, the "Interim Regulations on the Management of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Flight", which opened up the management of the military, dependent territories and civil aviation, and provided direction for local governments to standardize the management of drones in the future.

This is one of the reasons why Meituan UAV made a judgment that it can be promoted on a large scale in three to five years. The promulgation of the new interim regulations made Mao very optimistic, and even called 2023 the "first year of low-altitude economy".

"Due to policy reasons, we were not able to go hand in hand in urban promotion before, and we are now actively exploring distribution into more core areas of the city. After the policy was promulgated, many experts believed that China entered the first year of low-altitude economy. Five years later, there is a high probability that we will enter a city, which will be a system that will directly cover the distribution of the whole city." Mao said in one year.

In addition, on February 23, 2023, Meituan UAV was officially approved by the Civil Aviation Administration of China and obtained the "Approval Letter for the Trial Operation of Specific Types of UAVs" and the "General Aviation Enterprise Operation License", which also indicates that it has the domestic compliance licenses required for commercial landing.

Meituan drones are stationed in Shenzhen Window of the World, so that people can also order cold drinks in the scenic area|Meituan

However, Mao said that even if the cost and policies can be in place, the number of takeaways that Meituan drones can carry in the end may only be 5%-10% of all takeaways, because the number of takeaways is too much, and the drones that the entire low-altitude logistics can carry are limited after all.

"People and drones must coexist." Mao said that "drones may send some orders with high value, or long distances, or more timeliness."

From this point of view, the unemployment problem caused by drone delivery, which people usually focus on, may not exist. In addition to drones ultimately accounting for only a tiny fraction of orders on food delivery platforms, Mao also predicted that drone delivery would bring some new and better related job opportunities.

For example, drone delivery is currently unable to solve the problem of "last hundred meters", so areas that use drone delivery in the future may need to hire delivery staff to take orders in a mall and deliver them to the boxes delivered by drones. Or a delivery man waiting in a neighborhood to deliver orders delivered by drones to your door.

In addition, drone delivery also requires remote monitoring by aircrews, who are responsible for some tasks, including power replacement, and these job delivery staff can be transferred after training. Mao said that the main air crew is still the previously recruited drone pilots, but there are indeed cases of delivery workers who have been trained and taken up their posts. And with the development of automation, the requirements for the professional technology of UAV flight of aircrews will become lower and lower.

When asked how firm Meituan is to the drone business, Mao showed great optimism: "Meituan itself has a saying within itself, long-term patience. We've been doing this for five years now, and there's no problem sticking with it for another five years."

"Meituan is a big Internet enterprise, even if others do not enter the market, we are willing to lead and promote the drone delivery matter." Now is the best time. We hope that more friends can participate. We started a little earlier, and there is a demand for natural high-frequency scenarios such as takeaway, which may take a little first-mover advantage. But we are willing to share more relevant experiences with you in the future." Mao Nian said.