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It’s no secret by now that the Chinese tech sector is going all-in on robotics. Last September, the country broke the record for the number of industrial robots in operation; the People’s Republic likewise produces about 90 percent of the world’s humanoid robots, which factories and kiosks are experimenting with across the country.
Now, even China’s state-owned postal carrier is getting in on the frenzy. According photos released by People’s Daily, a state media organ, humanoid robots are now being deployed to sort packages at a major mail processing facility in the southern city of Guangzhou.
The facility, run by the country’s state-owned mail enterprise China Post Group Co Ltd, has installed an unspecified number of humanoid package handlers, which together are capable of processing up to 1,200 parcels per hour, People’s Daily claims.
According to reporting shared on Chinese social media, the robot in question is a Xingdong M7, produced by the company RobotEra. Though the base unit isn’t bipedal — it appears to be a torso on a stand, basically —the M7 is advertised as having a 360-degree field of view integrated with 3D LiDAR, which it uses to guide arms its with 7 degrees of freedom, and hands with 12.
Humanoids are increasingly being deployed in industrial settings like these around the world, where arm and finger dexterity is often prioritized over mobility. While the M7 can be upgraded to have legs, the package sorters in Guangzhou are static and posted at stations along a conveyor belt which brings the packages to them.
Despite the buzzy photo-op, there is a question of how efficient each particular M7 actually is on the jobsite, especially compared to a human package handler. In a recent test of a similar robot by US firm Figure AI, a human intern was able to sort 192 more packages than his metallic co-worker over a 10-hour shift, despite taking lunch and bathroom breaks.
Either way, the visible presence of humanoids in a state-owned mail facility — and their spotlight in People’s Daily — is a pretty solid sign of Chinese authorities’ confidence in the country’s robotics industry. In addition to a growing army of M7s, the China Post hub employs a legion of robotic arms and unmanned forklifts, processing an average of 6.5 million parcels a day.
While humanoids probably won’t be doing all the industrial lifting anytime soon, their increasingly productive presence in the factories of the world is becoming pretty difficult to ignore.
More on humanoid robots: Japanese Airport Trialing Humanoid Robots as Baggage Handlers
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