We have already memorized the rumors that robots will take over most of the work that people do in the future. However, global crises such as coronavirus accelerate events that would normally take years to happen. Humanity is experiencing technological leaps during the epidemic. Another technology that we normally expect to see one day but cannot predict, is about to enter our lives. In a city called Zibo in eastern China, an unmanned vehicle carried heavy loads during the 2-month quarantine. Developed by a company named UDI, founded by the professor of Ming Kong, University of Science and Technology at Hong Kong, the vehicle has a full load-carrying capacity of 1 ton. Since the beginning of February, 2,500 expeditions have been made in the quarantined areas with unmanned vehicles:
UDI’s unmanned vehicle managed to take grocery shopping, products such as fresh fruit and vegetables to addresses for 2 months without any human intervention. The founder of the company and one of the developers of the vehicle. Lui has already underlined that many companies are ready for such unmanned transport systems. Jack Ma, the founder of another Chinese company, Alibaba, stated that if proper infrastructure is established, at least 1 billion cargoes can be transported per day. According to a McKinsey report published in 2016, autonomous vehicles will receive 80% of the transport industry by 2026. UDI, on the other hand, is one of the companies that has the opportunity to speed up the business and seriously test the technologies in question. There are many other companies in this area, such as Waymo, Zoox, Cruise. There are similar attempts in the Silicon Valley of the USA, and similar tests have been carried out in real traffic conditions for a few years. The vehicle was used in October 2019 at Foxconn Industrial Park, where iPhones were also produced:
Stating that the vehicles they produce are not automobiles, Prof. Lui and his team said that they aim to be the first company to realize mass production of autonomous logistics vehicles in the world. Let’s see when autonomous delivery vehicles will be ordinary parts of our lives.
