Serve Robotics has announced a pilot partnership with Wing Aviation to expand the range of its autonomous food delivery without requiring restaurants to install new equipment to accommodate drone pickups.
Serve, which was spun out of the app-based delivery company Postmates in 2021, has been making Uber Eats food deliveries in Los Angeles for a few years now, using robots that look like autonomous shopping carts. Serve says its delivery robots can be a safer alternative to cars and help reduce traffic congestion as they operate primarily on sidewalks. Since they have a top speed of around six miles per hour, there should be little to no risk to pedestrians. But that approach also limits the robot’s ability to deliver food in a timely manner.
In addition, although Serve says its robots have a range of up to 25 miles while carrying 50 pounds of food, half of the delivery runs it makes in Los Angeles are “within two miles of a restaurant,” according to Dr. Ali Kashani, Serve’s CEO and cofounder.
The pilot partnership with Wing, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, is an attempt to expand that delivery range to a six-mile radius using a robot-to-drone multimodal delivery solution. Last year, Wing introduced its Wing Delivery Network, which includes AutoLoader stations where deliveries are picked up by its autonomous drones. Retailers can choose to install these AutoLoader stations in their parking lots, but that’s not an option for smaller restaurants.
The pilot partnership will initially roll out in Dallas, where “select Wing deliveries” will be picked up from a restaurant by one of Serve’s delivery robots. The robot will then bring it to a Wing AutoLoader station “a few blocks away,” according to Serve, where a drone will complete the delivery. Since Wing’s drones travel at up to 65mph and aren’t slowed by traffic lights or road congestion, the partnership will potentially bring a best-of-both-worlds approach to autonomous food delivery.
The service is expected to start within the next few months and will also help Wing expand its drone delivery services to merchants located in areas where space is limited and who don’t want to hire extra staff to act as go-betweens.
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