Drones and sidewalk delivery robots promise to make last-mile delivery cheaper and more efficient, but they both have their limitations. Drones have trouble touching down in dense urban areas, and sidewalk robots tap out after a couple of miles. Uber-backed Serve Robotics and Alphabet’s Wing are betting that combining forces might just create the ultimate automated last-mile delivery service.
And they’re set to try out their robot-to-drone delivery relay in Dallas in the coming months.
Serve’s CEO Ali Kashani told TechCrunch the partnership has the potential to expand the company’s delivery area, which is currently limited to around two miles. It also could allow merchants to tap into drone delivery without making any changes to their facilities or workflow.
Here’s how it’ll work.
A select number of customer orders will be picked up by a Serve bot from a single restaurant or store’s curbside and carted a few blocks away. The bots will then pass the food baton to a single Wing “AutoLoader,” where it can be picked up by a Wing drone and flown to customers as far as six miles away.
“If you look at delivery the way it is today, it’s always multimodal,” Kashani said. “Drones and robots have a very non-overlapping profile, where usually robots make sense in denser urban environments … whereas drones have limitations in those environments. You need some kind of real estate to show up in front of a restaurant and grab an item [with a drone.] So this is where the two really add up nicely together because being able to offer customers and merchants a fuller kind of solution where all deliveries, whether they’re short or long distance, can be automated.”
Kashani also noted that the robot drop-offs would be asynchronous with the drone pick-ups. He said the robot will drop the package onto the AutoLoader and the drone can grab it anytime after that.
Details of the trial are scant. Neither Serve nor Wing would share how many of their bots or drones would be involved, where the AutoLoaders and other assisting infrastructure would be located, or which merchant would be the first to try out this experiment. Oddly, when asked, Wing told TechCrunch that it would be an existing merchant partner of Serve, and Serve told TechCrunch it would be an existing merchant partner of Wing.
Serve delivers for around 300 restaurants in Los Angeles via the Uber Eats and 7-Eleven platforms, and recently started delivering for Shake Shack. Wing works with Walmart in Dallas, and has done a drone delivery pilot with DoorDash and Wendy’s in Virginia.
A spokesperson for Wing said the partnership would not be with Walmart.
Sometimes, these pilots progress into an actual commercial enterprise. For now, this could be more experimentation as Serve and Wing figure out whether there’s a real business case for drone and bot delivery.
The partnership comes nearly six months after Serve went public via a reverse merger with gross proceeds of $40 million. The company also recently raised another $20 million in a private placement and warrant exercise.
Serve’s CFO Brian Read told TechCrunch the company has enough cash on hand to get it towards its goals of putting an additional 250 bots on the streets of Los Angeles in the first quarter of 2025, and up to 2,000 bots in multiple U.S. cities by the end of next year through a contract with Uber Eats.