Residents pick up mail items at the unmanned postal station.

On March 17, Shanxi Postal Branch of China Post Group Corporation Limited launched its first unmanned smart postal station at Dingtai Fenghua residential community, Bingzhou South Road, Taiyuan, Shanxi. The postal station is unattended, where residents can send or collect mail items all by themselves 24 hours a day. Compared with smart parcel lockers, the smart postal station can accommodate more parcels, and allow simultaneous mailing of several items or multi-pickups by several recipients.

After entering the station through facial recognition, postmen put the parcels at appropriate places on the shelves based on their sizes. The smart shelves then automatically generate pickup codes according to the captured information (shelf number, level number and file number), transmit the codes to the station system along with the station code and other relevant information, and again send the pickup codes to corresponding recipients as well.

To claim their items, customers open the door to the station by typing the pickup code or their phone number. Then, the smart station will activate the light source system on the shelves, and red lights will flash at the places where the customers’ parcels are stored. If different customers claim their parcels at the same time, the system will assign flashing lights of different colors to differentiate parcels of each customer.

To ensure the security of the mail items, the station has installed a 360-degree cloud video surveillance system to enable traceability of gate-in/gate-out and mailing/pick-up information. Shanxi Postal Branch will deploy the first batch of 100 such smart stations across the province, providing round-the-clock self-pickup or mailing services for nearby residents.