Meituan M-Drone 4

The M-Drone 4 is the fourth generation of the delivery aircraft Meituan built for its own food-delivery business, and it is the machine behind most of the routine drone deliveries flown in Chinese cities. Unveiled in July 2023, it is designed around a constraint Western operators do not face: it delivers not to suburban gardens but into dense high-rise districts, where there is no lawn to drop a parcel on and the flight has to end on a fixed pick-up cabinet. The numbers are modest by cargo-drone standards and deliberately so. Maximum take-off weight is 9.5 kg, of which the customer's order may be 2.5 kg — roughly a meal for three. Fully loaded it flies a 5 km radius, or 10 km of route, at up to 20 m/s (72 km/h) and no higher than 120 m above ground. Two 12S lithium batteries take a 2C charge and give a 6C discharge, which matters more than endurance figures: the aircraft is meant to fly again minutes after it lands, not to fly far. The sensing package is unusually heavy for a machine this small — three pairs of stereo cameras, two HD and two ultra-HD monocular cameras and two 4D millimetre-wave radars — because the operating environment is the hard part. Routes run between towers, over pedestrians and through the wake turbulence of urban canyons, and the airspace is shared with other operators under Chinese low-altitude rules. Meituan flies it on scheduled commercial routes rather than on demand: each corridor is a fixed line between a merchant-side loading point and a pick-up station, with the first Shanghai route opened in Jinshan in April as a 2.2 km link between a shopping centre and an office building. Deliveries on such routes are quoted at 15 minutes, and the fleet had passed 900,000 real customer orders by mid-2026.

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The two biggest drone delivery services agree on the payload and disagree on everything after the flight

8/24/2026 · Keeta Drone (Meituan)

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