Meituan-Dianping will apply automatic delivery vehicle and aircraft to food delivery. [Photo/sina.com.cn]

A small automatic delivery vehicle was recently displayed at the headquarters of Meituan-Dianping, China's leading online provider of restaurant bookings, movie ticketing and other on-demand services.

The vehicle is less than one meter in width and 40 kg in weight and has a maximum speed of 40 km per hour.

Meituan Waimai, China's leading food delivery platform, needs more delivery capacity due to the rapid increase in its business, said Han Jian, director of the company.

Meituan currently employs 530,000 delivery workers in China providing an average delivery time of 30 minutes. Unmanned delivery vehicles will enhance delivery efficiency.

In March, tests were conducted on Meituan's automatic delivery vehicle in Beijing. It was able to accurately sense traffic situations by leveraging its sensors such as radar and a camera, avoid obstacles and send instructions to elevators and entrance guards in order to deliver foods directly to buyers' homes.

According to Han, Meituan will provide automatic delivery service in some regions in 2019. The company has been applying new technologies to its delivery service, such as cloud computing, big data and the internet of things (IoT), aiming to improve people's lives with new businesses and models.

Haier's COSMOPlat U+ artificial intelligence technology has been widely used in smart kitchens, smart bedrooms, smart living rooms, and smart care settings. [Photo by Cai Mengqi/chinadaily.com.cn]

Haier, China's leading home electric appliance company, is taking the lead in the IoT during the transition from "made in China" to "intelligent manufacturing in China".

"In order to meet users' demands for customized and instant services in the age of the IoT, Haier proposes to transform factories into 'factories of the Internet' to realize mass customization," said Li Fusheng, CIO of the global information platform of Haier Group.

Haier launched the world’s first industrial Internet platform -- COSMOPlat -- that connects users' demands with the whole intelligent manufacturing system.

"Users can participate in research and development and manufacturing of products, and the platform greatly improves production efficiency," said Li.

Human-computer interaction is fully demonstrated by the voice control system in Haier's showroom hall where one can expect fast computerized responses to spoken enquiries.

Both Meituan and Haier will show their latest IoT applications on the coming 2018 World IoT Expo from Sept 15 to 18 in Wuxi, East China's Jiangsu province.