During the JD.com 618 shopping festival, a group of unique new employees has commenced work at a flagship JD MALL location. Several intelligent robots have been officially stationed in the store, beginning to provide operational support across various roles including customer greeting and guidance, navigation and store tours, intelligent product consultation, stock replenishment and shelving, and store monitoring duties.
These robotic staff members are deployed across multiple core offline retail scenarios, spanning both front-of-house customer service and back-of-house inventory management. Their deployment represents an advancement in JD.com's offline consumer and operational models through embodied intelligent technology. The large-scale implementation of these robots at JD MALL also signifies an acceleration in the rollout of JD.com's robot retail solutions, which are built upon the company's self-developed foundational retail large language model technology, into the physical commercial sector.
Furthermore, JD.com has begun listing these robotic solutions for purchase online, enabling a one-stop deployment process. The company has also officially announced a global recruitment drive for high-quality robotics solution providers to join its platform. These initiatives aim to further lower the barrier to entry for robot usage, facilitating their adoption by a wide range of businesses and households.
Current Robotic Roles and Capabilities
The current cohort of robotic trainees at JD MALL has achieved a refined division of labor, aiding in the enhancement of store service quality and operational efficiency. The greeter position is filled by the Zhiyuan X2 humanoid robot, equipped with a specialized language database, responsible for guiding customers to locations such as restrooms, service desks, and brand counters.
The product consultant role is handled by the Unitree Go2 quadrupedal robot dog, which utilizes JoyInside navigation and tour capabilities to provide precise, category-level guidance and can adjust routes in real-time based on customer requests.
For stock management, the Zhiyuan G2 and RealMan RealBOT robots perform standardized operational tasks including product shelving, inventory organization, clutter tidying, and bed-making. Leveraging the JoyAI-RA model, their success rate for single-item shelving consistently exceeds 90%.
The customer service consultant position is managed by the Zhongqing shopping assistant robot. Utilizing JD.com's in-house AI research capabilities and connected to JD's vast product catalog encompassing tens of thousands of SKUs, it handles intelligent inquiries and precise product recommendations, providing real-time updates on specifications, promotions, and inventory.
Interactive Consumer Experience
At JD.com's offline robot experience store, the Songyan Power Xiaobumi robot serves as a robotic greeter, welcoming customers with greetings and dances, attracting clientele, and guiding consumers inside to experience trending product categories such as exoskeletons and AI companion robots.
Numerous robot dogs from brands like Weilan, Yunshenchu, Zhishen, Yuejiang, and Mojia also engage in deep interactions with users.
Additionally, JD.com is pioneering the introduction of cutting-edge robotic technology for direct consumer experience. Based on NVIDIA's open-source, real-time full-body motion generation "behavior foundation model" called SONIC, users wearing VR equipment can experience the remarkable sensation of their physical movements being mirrored by an avatar.