Serve Robotics, which makes autonomous sidewalk delivery bots, and Wing, Alphabet’s on-demand drone delivery service, announced a pilot partnership on Tuesday meant to expand autonomous last-mile food delivery in Dallas.
In the coming months, select Wing deliveries will be picked up by a Serve robot from a restaurant curbside and delivered to a Wing drone AutoLoader a few blocks away for aerial delivery to customers. The effort will allow Serve to expand its market to a broader area, while Wing can reach more consumers.
“At Wing, we have been delivering food and other goods directly to consumers for over five years, completing more than 400,000 commercial deliveries across three continents,” Wing CEO Adam Woodworth said in a statement. “Through this pilot partnership, Wing hopes to reach more merchants in highly congested areas while supporting Serve as it works to expand its delivery radius.”
Food delivery robots have been on the rise in recent years, often seen buzzing across college campuses and increasingly on city sidewalks. Demand for autonomous deliveries rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, when scores of consumers were ordering food online and had a preference for contactless delivery. Serve, which spun out of the Postmates after it was acquired by Uber, went public in April.
Wing, meanwhile, graduated from Alphabet’s secretive moonshot incubator, X, in 2018 to become a full company underneath the Alphabet umbrella.
It’s been difficult for drone delivery companies to scale due to long-standing regulations, but many of those regulatory hurdles have been cleared, and experts anticipate more platforms to take off. Wing, which is able to provide ultrafast deliveries thanks to the ability to bypass traffic, also released a report earlier this month that said more than half of consumers it polled were “likely” or “very likely” to use a drone delivery service if it were available in their area.
“Together, Serve and Wing share an ambitious vision for reliable and affordable robotic delivery at scale,” Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani said in a statement. “Our end-to-end robotic delivery solution will be the most efficient mode for the significant majority of deliveries.”
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