CHONGQING, July 11 (Xinhua) — In an orchard in Quchi Township of Wushan County in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality, villager Peng Bin finished picking fresh plums. A black robot dog soon trotted over to Peng, carrying a basket full of fruit on its back.
Eight minutes later, the plums arrived at a postal dispatch stop. They were packed and prepared for transfer to a drone.
Five minutes later, a drone loaded with over 50 kilograms of plums took off and reached the collection point at Wushan airport seven minutes later. On the tarmac, a special “plum flight” awaited takeoff.
With seamless coordination between robot dogs, drones and aircraft, the plums completed their journey out of the mountains in a very short time.
On both banks of the Three Gorges section of the Yangtze River in Chongqing, 300,000 mu (about 20,000 hectares) of Wushan plums are now ripening. Plum transportation in the area once relied on manual labor and trucks.
Peng, who has planted more than 100 mu of plums in this area with rough terrain. “Last year, we had drones. This year, we have robot dogs and drones. Plum transport is faster than ever, and we have saved a lot on labor costs,” Peng said.
Li Yongjun, general manager of the Wushan County branch of China Post Group Co., Ltd., said that the postal service has developed a new model combining “robot dog in the field transport, drone transfer and plum flights.”
Compared with human and animal labor, robot dogs have proved better suited to rough terrain — and they have more than tripled transport efficiency. Drone transfers, meanwhile, have broken through geographical constraints, further slashing the transport time.
“As transport efficiency has been greatly improved, consumers can enjoy high-quality Wushan plums shortly after they are picked, while farmers are also earning more,” Li noted.
Currently, fresh Wushan plums can be delivered within 24 hours to over 1,000 cities across China. This year, it is expected that 140,000 tonnes of plums will be sold nationwide, with total output value projected to exceed 2.2 billion yuan (about 307.6 million U.S. dollars), said Chen Huiyi, director of the Wushan County transportation bureau. ■
