JD.com to deploy 3 million robots to fully automate logistics

Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com is accelerating its push into robotics with a sweeping plan to automate its nationwide logistics network, while promising to retrain its vast workforce of couriers for technical roles as machines take over frontline duties. At an event in Beijing on Wednesday, the company’s logistics arm unveiled its industrial Wolf Robot series. Over the next five years, JD Logistics aimed to procure 3 million robots, 1 million unstaffed vehicles and 100,000 delivery drones to create a fully automated supply chain, according to Cao Peng, the chairman of the company’s technology committee. Designed to take up repetitive, labour-intensive tasks and operate in challenging conditions, the Wolf Robot system would pick, sort, transport and deliver goods with minimal human intervention, said Liu Lige, head of embodied intelligence robots at JD Logistics. The line-up included specialised units capable of operating in cold environments down to minus 20 degrees Celsius, automated pharmacy dispatchers and delivery drones, Liu said. The rapid shift towards automation comes as JD and its ecosystem companies continue to employ some 700,000 delivery and logistics personnel. To address job displacement concerns, founder Liu Qiangdong outlined earlier this year the company’s so-called Nirvana Plan, an initiative to retrain couriers and warehouse staff for technical roles like robot servicing and maintenance, ensuring frontline workers were retained as automation spread. Beyond hardware, JD was betting that its major advantage in embodied artificial intelligence would lie in data collection. Training general-purpose embodied AI models requires vast data sets. Global stockpiles of quality collected interaction data for embodied AI stood at about 500,000 hours as of early this year, far short of the tens of millions of hours required, according to a report in June by SWS Research. Leveraging its physical footprint across warehouses, retail stores and pharmacies, JD planned to gather more than 10 million hours of real-world operational data, Cao said. The company also aimed to establish more than 80 RoboBase hubs across China dedicated to robotics research, pilot production, data annotation, equipment upgrades and maintenance. To support the heavy computational demands of this ecosystem, JD signed a deal on Wednesday with Chinese chip designer Moore Threads to build a computing cluster powered by 100,000 domestic chips. The cluster would be used to train and run AI models, as well as embodied AI applications, and to help JD integrate domestic chips into an AI development pipeline that spans data collection, model training, simulation and deployment, according to the two companies.