With the surge in demand for the night economy and contactless services, unattended consumption scenarios are penetrating from the retail end to all areas of life .
The underlying driving force of this change, in addition to the digital transformation of traditional industries by technology, also reveals the logic of reconstructing the consumer ecosystem at a deeper level. When security technologies centered on computer vision, intelligent sensing, biometrics, and behavioral analysis are deeply integrated with the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence to empower terminal scenarios, the value of unmanned services has leaped from simple human labor replacement in the early days to a comprehensive innovation engine that builds the cornerstone of spatial security trust, reshapes the limits of operational efficiency, and ensures user experience.
Security technology is becoming the core force in defining the new experience of unmanned consumption.
Scene extension: " Hundred Scenes" without consumption
First of all, when you see the concept of "unattended consumption scenario", what kind of picture comes to your mind?
I think most people will immediately recall the scenes of themselves playing in self-service chess and card rooms, shopping in unmanned stores, and parking in unmanned parking lots.
unmanned experiences based on QR codes, inductive recognition and mobile payments have long been integrated into our daily lives and have become synonymous with convenience.
However, the scope of unattended consumption scenarios goes far beyond this.
From the unmanned breakfast carts on the street in the early morning to the unmanned study rooms open 24 hours late at night; from the smart fitness cabins equipped with AI personal trainers ,
To unmanned gaming cabins embedded with VR equipment; from unmanned delivery vehicles shuttling through communities to unmanned sightseeing buses that provide panoramic views... the tentacles of unmanned operations have extended to life services, health and entertainment, retail travel, and even more exploratory emerging edge fields.
In today's society, a technology-driven, unmanned consumption landscape is slowly unfolding...
Technical cornerstone: security technology drives scene transition
unmanned consumption scenarios is certainly due to the upgrading of consumers' demands for "instant gratification", "all-time service" and "seamless interaction", but the deeper driving force comes from the systematic breakthroughs in technologies such as artificial intelligence, edge computing, and multimodal perception with security as the core.
At present, technology has leaped from a simple "manpower replacement" tool to a core driving force for systematically reconstructing service models, reducing cost boundaries, and creating incremental value.
01 Computer Vision + Edge Intelligence: Allowing Machines to Understand Complex Scenarios
The pain points of early unmanned retail were the technical difficulties in handling issues such as product returns and multiple checkouts. Today, a "cloud-edge collaboration" system combining large visual models with edge computing has become a key breakthrough .
For example, the system deployed by Zhejiang Mobile for unmanned convenience stores in Wenzhou can track customers' entire process of picking up, putting back, and settling accounts in real time, understand behavioral intentions through spatiotemporal context , and significantly improve the recognition rate of missed items by 50%.
The advantage of this architecture lies in its dynamic evolution capability - based on continuous training of edge data , the model can perform hourly algorithm iterations for abnormal scenarios such as new types of theft , and the training speed can reach 2.5 times the industry standard, achieving "getting smarter with use".
At the same time, the sinking of computing power has greatly reduced costs. In Zhejiang Mobile's AI-manned stores, it uses AI smart boxes to perform real-time facial recognition and abnormal behavior recognition, and uses edge video data to train large cloud models, saving 50% of the number of cloud customer service personnel and increasing the theft and loss detection rate by 50%.
02 Multimodal perception + autonomous decision-making: injecting action into machines
When the scene extends from static shelves to dynamic physical spaces, multimodal perception and autonomous decision-making technologies "inject action" into the machine, building a closed loop of "perception-analysis-execution".
Yunshenchu Technology 's X30 four- legged robot dog is used in the Ningxia Gobi Desert booster station . It integrates lidar, thermal imaging and inertial navigation. It can autonomously plan routes in harsh environments such as sandstorms and light rain. It can cover up to 349 inspection objects in a single day, with an identification accuracy rate of 96.5%, replacing the arduous manual inspection.
Similarly, in the energy sector, Shaanxi Investment Group's Daqin drone photovoltaic inspection system uses an onboard infrared camera to accurately capture the temperature difference of photovoltaic panels and automatically marks faults using AI algorithms. This significantly improves efficiency compared to manual labor and reduces annual operation and maintenance costs .
These breakthrough applications indicate that machines are evolving from “environmental observers” to “scene actors,” building a new line of defense for efficient and reliable services and security in complex environments that are beyond the reach of human power.
03 Low-altitude economy + autonomous collaborative network: Reconstructing the space service radius
low-altitude economy and autonomous collaborative networks has completely broken the limitations of "fixed points" and reconstructed the spatial radius of services.
Shaanxi Water Development Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. has developed an "air-ground collaborative unmanned delivery system" . The drone is equipped with dual redundant links and an emergency parachute to achieve centimeter-level precise landing; the ground robot integrates lidar and depth vision, and can autonomously avoid obstacles and seamlessly connect goods.
In addition, the drone emergency medical supplies distribution project jointly carried out by Liaoning Mobile and Dalian Women and Children's Medical Center also verified this point. A six-rotor medical drone, relying on 5G network and Beidou navigation, delivered medical supplies from the children's hospital to the Changjiang Road branch 1.3 kilometers away in just 5 minutes, saving the patient's life.
04 Biometrics + Touchless Interaction: A Coding Revolution in Trust Mechanisms
Building a non-face-to-face trust relationship is the core challenge of unmanned scenarios, and the integration of biometrics and contactless payment risk control technology has realized the "coding revolution of trust mechanisms."
Zhongguancun Online's 3C experience store utilizes Baidu's high-precision (99%) facial recognition technology, creating a seamless closed-loop system: "face scan to enter - behavioral analysis - contactless payment." The Jiangxi Ganjiang New District Economic Development Zone has introduced the nation's first unmanned convenience store using iris-based checkout. Customers simply register by entering their palm vein and phone number before entering. After selecting items, they can complete payment with a single glance. This simplicity and convenience have also resulted in an unprecedentedly low missed payment rate .
From the above cases and data, it can be seen that the systematic breakthroughs in security technology are reshaping the boundaries of unmanned consumption experience with unprecedented depth and breadth, providing a solid technical foundation for all-time, all-area, and seamless services .
Hidden concerns emerge: security vulnerabilities and collaborative governance in unmanned scenarios
Although security technology has drawn a convenient and efficient blueprint for unmanned consumption, its openness and automation characteristics have also given rise to new risks.
unmanned scenarios where biometric technology is widely used , this risk is further amplified.
Taking biometrics as an example, if highly sensitive information such as irises and palm veins is illegally obtained or abused, the consequences will be unimaginable.
Data from the China Internet Network Information Center shows that medical data leaks surged 83% year-on-year in 2024, with more than 6 million electronic medical records circulating on the black market. Medical data contains a large amount of patients' biometric information, such as fingerprints, faces, voiceprints, etc. The chain reaction of these medical data leaks can directly affect unmanned consumption scenarios.
What is more serious is that the leakage of biological information is irreversible.
Unlike traditional passwords, which can be reset after a leak, biometrics like irises and fingerprints, once stolen, pose a lifelong risk to victims. According to Frost & Sullivan, genomic data breaches are expected to increase by 120% in 2025 compared to 2022. If this type of data is used in unmanned environments, it could lead to targeted fraud or identity theft.
Security threats at the system logic level should not be ignored either.
The communication and control networks that unmanned equipment relies on may become entry points for attacks.
Tencent Security 's Xuanwu Lab, in related research, demonstrated the ability to exploit 5G communication protocol vulnerabilities to hijack drone communication links within the same base station. This attack could cause drones to deviate from their intended routes and even lead to cargo information leakage, seriously impacting the safety and stability of drone deliveries.
In the unmanned retail sector, this means that hackers are very likely to tamper with the cloud pricing algorithm or exploit vulnerabilities in edge devices to achieve "zero-yuan purchase" of goods, causing direct economic losses to merchants.
At the beginning of 2024, a report released by the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center warned that among the vulnerabilities of IoT devices, high-risk remote code execution vulnerabilities accounted for as much as 32%. Such vulnerabilities open the door to malicious manipulation of devices. Once exploited by criminals, the normal operation of unmanned retail systems will suffer severe damage.
The vulnerability of physical protection presents another challenge.
Unmanned environments inherently lack on-site deterrence. In 2023, police in Wuhan's Hongshan District reported 21 cases of violent vandalism at shared fitness centers within three months, with equipment repair costs exceeding one million yuan. That same year, an unmanned cargo container in a Beijing community was technically unlocked, resulting in losses of 50,000 yuan worth of merchandise in a single month.
This type of damage or theft of physical equipment directly impacts the sustainability of the business model.
Faced with multi-dimensional risks, a single technical solution is difficult to build a complete shield, and there is an urgent need to accelerate the implementation of a "three-in-one" governance framework consisting of policy supervision, technological innovation and industry collaboration.
01Policy supervision:
Rigid regulations are the starting point of governance logic. There is an urgent need to establish a tiered and categorized regulatory framework tailored to the characteristics of unmanned scenarios, particularly by establishing "safety thresholds" for the application of highly sensitive technologies like biometrics.
For example, Shenzhen implemented the first comprehensive legislation in the domestic data field, the "Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Data Regulations", which reasonably restricted the processing of biometric data and made stricter regulations on the processing of biometric data than the processing of other data, cutting off the chain of data abuse from the legislative level.
What is more crucial is to establish a dynamically adaptable "regulatory sandbox" mechanism. Zhejiang allows companies to test unmanned equipment such as smart unmanned logistics vehicles and unmanned delivery vehicles on the mountain roads of Moganshan Town, Deqing County, Huzhou, and Nanhu District, Jiaxing after filing. At the same time, it requires real-time uploading of operating data for safety assessment, so as to find a balance between innovation and regulation.
02Technological Innovation:
The technical defense line needs to penetrate the three risk spaces of data, system, and physical.
In response to the irreversibility of biometric leakage, the end-cloud collaborative risk control technology developed by Ant Group provides a new approach: when a customer registers his or her palm vein in an unmanned store, the terminal device splits it into three encrypted fragments, which are stored on the user's mobile phone, edge server and cloud respectively. Any single point of leakage cannot restore the complete biometric information.
To address the shortcomings of physical protection, technical solutions are shifting from passive resistance to intelligent resilience: Cainiao Express Station’s latest smart express lockers are equipped with a micro-stress sensing matrix. When a tentative touch of an unlocking tool is detected, it will not only trigger a 105-decibel sound and light alarm, but can also instantly fuse the core components of the lock core through a self-destruct circuit, completely blocking the technical unlocking path.
03Industry Collaboration:
Isolated security protection is vulnerable to systematic attacks.
At the technical joint defense level, JD Logistics cooperated with China Unicom to build a safe communication guarantee system for drone delivery by utilizing the low latency and high reliability characteristics of the 5G network. The ground base station monitors the drone communication link in real time. Once an abnormality is detected, it can quickly switch to the backup communication channel to ensure the safety of drone delivery.
In terms of building user trust, the China Payment and Clearing Association has taken the lead in formulating a series of payment security standards and specifications, and promoted the establishment of an industry risk information sharing mechanism. When consumers encounter risks when using unmanned retail terminals for payment, they can obtain compensation through a rapid response mechanism, thereby enhancing consumers' trust in unmanned payment scenarios.
Conclusion
When policies define the operating track for security technology, the technology itself achieves genetic-level evolution, and the industry collaborates to form a defense community, security technology has finally surpassed the functional limitations of traditional "guarding the house" and grown into the core operating system for unmanned consumption scenarios.
Computer vision has been upgraded from identifying products to interpreting behavioral intentions, biometrics has evolved from an identity verification tool to a distributed trust protocol, and edge computing has evolved from a data processing node to an autonomous decision-making center - every leap in security technology is redefining the operating rules and experience boundaries of unmanned consumption spaces.
This is not only an upgrade in risk prevention and control, but also a paradigm revolution in which security technology moves from behind the scenes to the front stage: only when technology truly becomes a "boundless guardian" in unmanned scenarios can it usher in a new era of consumption based on safety.