Recently, Wal Mart, a large US retailer, announced that it would build the largest UAV delivery business in the United States and planned to provide UAV delivery services to 4million households in six US states by the end of this year. According to Wal Mart's plan, customers will buy goods with a total weight of no more than 10 pounds and pay US $3.99 for shipping every day from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and the goods will be delivered by UAV within 30 minutes. Some media said that this was the "first large-scale UAV distribution plan" in the United States. In the United States, Wal Mart is not the first company to deliver drones. Amazon, an e-commerce giant well known to consumers, Domino's, a chain restaurant, and technology companies such as Google's parent companies alphabet and apple are also testing unmanned delivery systems and services. During the COVID-19, the advantages of unmanned distribution, zero contact, flexibility and convenience, and labor saving were highlighted. More enterprises saw its value and accelerated the layout. Will unmanned distribution be another "outlet" in the post epidemic era? From the demand side, with the development of e-commerce, the demand of logistics distribution market represented by takeout and express is growing rapidly, followed by the problem of insufficient transportation capacity. Unmanned distribution can effectively solve the shortage of transportation capacity and meet the needs of users. According to the prediction of McKinsey & company, in the next 10 years, 80% of the package delivery will be carried out by automatic distribution. From the actions of major enterprises at home and abroad, unmanned distribution has stood at the "tuyere". In terms of cost, expensive manpower and difficult recruitment are currently a major problem in the logistics distribution industry. Taking Wal Mart as an example, the performance in the first quarter of this year was less than expected, and the high labor cost was one of the important reasons. Compared with the labor cost, although the cost of UAV or UAV distribution is relatively high at the initial stage of R & D and operation, with the continuous maturity of technology and the formation of supply chain system, the cost of single piece distribution will be greatly reduced, which is also an important reason to attract enterprises to make a big layout. From the perspective of environment, the epidemic situation provides an application scenario for unmanned distribution. The non-contact transportation brought by unmanned distribution has become a safer and more efficient choice, which has effectively solved the "last mile" problem and is favored by businesses and users. However, in the actual operation process, there are still many problems to be solved, the key of which is security. In the face of complex practical application scenarios, the unmanned distribution technology is still "crossing the river by feeling the stone", which needs to make up for loopholes in testing and operation, and iterative upgrading. In addition, supporting standards such as UAV airspace management, UAV right of way, consumer privacy protection, and relevant policies and regulations need to be continuously improved. Under the epidemic, unmanned distribution has become a new focus of retailers, operators and capital chasing. In the post epidemic era, whether unmanned distribution can be changed from "tuyere" to industry standard configuration depends on how enterprises solve various problems in "landing". (Xinhua News Agency)