Japanese firms use cutting edge technology for safe and swift delivery

For quick delivery of goods to the Asian region, Yamato Holdings, a Japanese courier service known as TA-Q-BIN, has constructed Japan's largest comprehensive super logistics terminal called the "Haneda Chrono Gate.

The company has introduced latest material handling machines at their logistics base for home and international delivery of goods.

Haneda Chrono Gate started operations in October this year.

Mitsumasa Inoue, Head of Haneda Chrono Gate, Yamato Holdings Co Ltd., said: "Haneda Chrono Gate is located next to the Haneda International Airport. It also has access to Tokyo Port, Yokohama Port and Japan Railway Facility. It is an ideal location for providing multi-transport function utilizing land, sea and air transportations. The overall Chrono Gate facility consists of three constructions - Logistics building, office building and regional public contribution facility."

Packages destined for Asian countries through Chrono Gate are collected at Okinawa International Logistics Hub, and then delivered to each customer.

The incoming cargo from overseas is directly delivered from Haneda and Narita airports straight to the facility.

Inoue said: "The sorting area is located at the ground floor in the logistics building. We have installed the latest material handling technology here. The robot arm is one of our cutting edge technologies. Before that, it was manually operated by putting boxes onto the belt conveyor. The robot arm realized a lot of labour saving. We also installed this scanner, which enables sorting for both sending and arriving parcels at the same time. It makes it possible to do speed sorting by reading multiple barcodes for each delivery destination. This "cross-belt sorter" contributes to twice faster sorting transactions up to 48,000 parcels per hour, as compared to 24,000 earlier."

It's not only in logistics; Japan's latest car manufacturing technology will promote road safety.

Nissan is already working on technology which uses laser scanners, around view monitor cameras as well as advanced vehicle intelligence actuators.

It is working with institutions such as Oxford, MIT, Stanford and the University of Tokyo to introduce autonomous drive vehicle.

Andy Palmer, Executive Vice President, Nissan, said: "We've announced that we will introduce autonomous drive vehicle by 2020 and we said within two vehicle life cycles, we'll make that technology available across the inter-portfolio. So, I think what we've done is we built out and we fleshed out the two key pillars of Nissan Motor company. Zero Emission, Zero Fatality of the autonomous driving is really about the kind of goal of Zero fatalities."

Mitsuhika Yamashita, Executive Vice President, Nissan, said: "I think the vehicle has a very high potential. What we can do from this now is accumulating more knowledge, or more negotiations with the old traffic conditions. The vehicle becomes smarter and smarter as we accumulate those conditions. The vehicle become smarter and smarter as we accumulate those kind of knowledge and databases toward it, so this has a big potential."

Japanese technology has made life convenient for people in walks of life, across the world.