Foundations for Future
When the Light of Internet Expo opened in the water town of Wuzhen in Zhejiang Province in east China on November 22, local star Xiaomanlu or Little Donkey was the cynosure of all eyes.
It is a logistics robot developed by e-commerce giant Alibaba’s innovation institution DAMO Academy, a jaunty self-driving van with a glass front, enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Launched to improve logistics for the Double 11 online shopping festival on November 11, it has been delivering parcels to students at Zhejiang University in provincial capital Hangzhou and getting rave reviews. Xiaomanlu can choose the best traffic route and deliver up to 500 parcels a day. Xu Liang, an engineer with the academy, told Chongqing-based Shangyou News it can run 100 km on only 4 kWh of electricity. During the shopping festival, 22 such robots were put into use in a campus of
