QINGDAO, June 5 (Xinhua) -- In the eastern Chinese coastal city of Qingdao in Shandong Province, more than 1,100 AI-powered unmanned delivery vehicles are navigating streets and alleys, demonstrating capabilities in autonomous route planning, braking and obstacle avoidance.
Neolix, one of the pioneers in deploying unmanned vehicles in Qingdao, launched its pilot program in June last year. According to the company, these vehicles boast a load capacity of 1 tonne, a top speed of 45 kilometers per hour and a maximum range of 200 kilometers. So far, they have completed more than 1.5 million deliveries.
Miao Qiankun, the company's chief technology officer, said their "vision-action" large model allows the unmanned vehicles to understand complex traffic scenarios just like experienced human drivers. Notably, the vehicles can reduce the terminal distribution cost by about 50 percent while improving distribution efficiency by roughly 30 percent.
China issued a new generation AI development plan in 2017, and unveiled guidelines on further implementing the "AI Plus" initiative last year. The country's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) also calls for fully implementing the initiative to foster AI-driven development, fueling the burgeoning growth of its AI innovations.
Currently, AI is deeply integrated with industries ranging from health care and transportation to finance, spawning a wealth of groundbreaking applications.
In the medical sector, for example, an intelligent bionic hand product at a brain-computer science demonstration center in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, has enabled an employee who lost both arms to write Chinese calligraphy, while a disabled foreign woman was able to stand up with the help of a Chinese exoskeleton robot exhibited at this year's Canton Fair in Guangdong Province in south China.
In the realm of scientific research, researchers at the Ocean University of China have used AI to discover a class of candidate compounds with anti-tumor activity. "AI has played an important role in the discovery of new marine drugs," said Xu Ximing, a senior engineer at the university.
As the only country in the world to encompass all industrial categories in the United Nations industrial classification, China has provided a vast stage for AI development with its rich resources of personalized and scenario-based applications.
At the 2026 World Intelligent Industry Expo in north China's Tianjin Municipality, a four-legged robot dog on display is expected to free workers from repetitive, heavy or high-risk tasks underground.
Chinese company Unitree Robotics has also developed a bionic four-legged intelligent inspection and fire emergency robot. Through AI vision and other technologies, it can detect abnormal temperature, equipment damage, gas leakage and other hidden hazards in substations, power plants and chemical plants where harsh fire emergency environments are common.
Statistics from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show that in 2025, AI covered more than 70 percent of business scenarios in leading smart factories across the country, promoting the large-scale application of over 1,700 key intelligent manufacturing equipment and industrial software items.
AI will "coexist and collaborate" with humans in production and daily life, significantly lowering the technical threshold and enhancing both production quality and living standards, said Han Ziqiang, a professor from Shandong University.
"The ultimate significance of technology lies in its ability to serve people and make human life better," Han added. ■
