Chinese ecommerce giant shows off its first ever ‘robot warehouse’

A driverless forklift. Photo credit: Toyota Material Handling.

A Chinese tech giant has opened its first fully automated sorting center where robots and machines handle 9,000 online shopping orders per hour – with hardly a human in sight.

The brand-new facility, run by Alibaba arch-rival JD, does the work that would normally be done by 180 human sorters.

JD, which differentiates itself from Alibaba, China’s top ecommerce company, by being more like Amazon in supplying and handling many of its orders, employs 17,540 people at its other warehouses.

Inside JD’s first ever fully automated warehouse. Photo credit: JD.

This automated test facility in Kunshan, just outside Shanghai, heralds a future where China’s ecommerce industry – set to top US$1.2 trillion in consumer spending this year – will need fewer humans at the logistics level.

“Once packages are taken off trucks at one side of the Kunshan facility, they’re loaded onto a complex network of automated machinery, where fast-moving, automated conveyors zip each box around,” said a JD statement this morning. “Image scanners can check the packages in microseconds, while JD’s smart logistics system calculates where the packages should be dropped off. The packages are grouped by region into large bins, which are picked up by driverless forklifts and brought to the corresponding truck for delivery to the right destination.”

Job losses death knell

Across China, rising wages and a push for greater efficiency are leading tech and non-tech companies to adopt more automation technology, combining recent developments in machines, artificial intelligence, and image recognition.

“We still need a lot of humans to use the camera, to observe or control the drone, the delivery robotics, and the people-free warehouse,” said JD founder and CEO Richard Liu in a recent CNBC interview on the subject of automation. “We still need a lot of workers to maintain or fix the whole system.”

“But if you look at the whole country, or the whole society, I think some people will lose their jobs,” he added.

As part of JD’s automation and AI push, it’s quadrupling the size of its Silicon Valley research and development center this year to 120 people. A few months back it set up the JD Logistics division to focus more on its trucks, delivery people, warehouses, robots, and drones.

“At the rate that ecommerce is growing in China and around the world, robotics and automation will be a necessary solution to meet that explosion in demand,” Zhenhui Wang, CEO of JD Logistics, said today.

JD has 258 million shoppers who spent US$94.8 billion in 2016.

Watch: Alibaba’s robot army

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from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/china-fully-automated-sorting-center-jd-ecommerce
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