Meituan Partners with NVIDIA, Valeo and Icona for Autonomous Delivery Platform
Meituan Dianping partners with NVIDIA, Icona, and Valeo to expand its autonomous delivery platform.
Meituan Dianping adds three major new partners to its Meituan Autonomous Delivery (MAD) platform at CES 2019. The Chinese on-demand food delivery giant teams up with NVIDIA for research and trial operations, Italian design firm Icona for vehicle and robot design, and French automotive supplier Valeo for engines and sensors.
The MAD platform launches in July 2018 in Beijing as an open ecosystem, and it already includes partners like Uditech, Segway-GX, iDriverPlus, and Roadster. In the current system, autonomous vehicles gather orders from restaurants and deliver them to designated pick-up points or complete the journey entirely within office parks and universities, though most orders still require a human driver for at least part of the trip.
This expansion comes just four months after Meituan Dianping goes public in Hong Kong, boasting a massive network of 382.3 million annual users and 5.5 million merchants. The company faces strong competition from Alibaba's Ele.me, which recently begins its own drone delivery operations, making the push for autonomous delivery technology a crucial battleground in the Chinese logistics market.