Meituan unmanned delivery team to be nearly tripled in size

Beijing (Gasgoo)- Meituan’s unmanned delivery center will reportedly add another 500 jobs, covering algorithm, engineering, and other fields. Those new positions will be mainly in Beijing and Shenzhen. Currently, the center has about 300 staff members.  

Most of the new jobs in Beijing will be related to research and development while those in Shenzhen are supposed to be engineering-related. Specifically, Meituan unmanned delivery center needs talents in autonomous driving planning, control system, vehicle engineering, sensors and business operation.

Latest version of Meituan's unmanned delivery; Photo credit: Meituan

Back to October, 2016, Meituan built W project team to develop self-driving delivery vehicles for certain scenarios. In 2017, the company officially established unmanned delivery center before it launched its first self-developed autonomous delivery vehicle. In 2019, it is allowed to conduct road test with T3 license.

In 2021, Meituan launched its next generation of autonomous delivery vehicle, which is 2450 mm long, 1010 mm wide and 1900 mm high. Its loading capacity is 150kg and maximum speed can be 45km per hour. The vehicle has a range of 120km, which is enough for a whole day’s delivery tasks. Equipped with 3 Lidars, 19 cameras, 2 millimeter-wave radars and 9 ultrasonic sensors, the vehicle can recognize objects within a range of 5cm to 150m and real-time environmental sensing.

The latest version of Meituan’s delivery vehicle has been put into daily operation in Shunyi District, Beijing. By March, its self-driving delivery vehicles have finished 35,000 delivery orders and run a total of 300,000 kilometers. Last month, Meituan was granted road test license for unmanned delivery vehicles in Beijing.  

In the next 3 years, Meituan aims to expand its unmanned delivery operation to such cities as Shanghai, Shenzhen and increase its vehicles to 10,000.