Though not exactly commonplace quite yet, rolling robots have been delivering goods to local customers for a while now. At the same time, packages have been flying overhead by drone. Now Serve Robotics and Wing Aviation are ready to merge the two.
Wing – which is owned by Google's parent, Alphabet – has been moving small packages by air since at least 2018, longer if you include incubation under Alphabet's Project X. The company's "highly automated" battery-electric drones have since delivered "everything from medicine and library books, to hot coffees and fresh cookies to customers" to hundreds of thousands of customers in Australia, the US, Finland and Ireland.
Delivery robots from Uber-backed Serve Robotics haven't been rolling along US sidewalks for quite as long, but the company "has completed tens of thousands of deliveries for enterprise partners such as Uber Eats and 7-Eleven." Now the two entities are merging to extend the reach of the rolling delivery bots in Dallas, TX.
The pilot project will see food items picked up at restaurants by Serve's robot. This will then make its way to an Autoloader within a radius of a few blocks for transfer to a Wing drone. Then the multi-rotor/fixed-wing hybrid aircraft will take to the air above busy streets to deliver the goods to customers up to 6 miles away.
"We're excited to partner with Wing to offer a multi-modal delivery experience that expands our market from roughly half of all food deliveries that are within 2 miles of a restaurant, to offering 30-minute autonomous delivery across an entire city," said Serve's CEO and co-founder, Dr. Ali Kashani.
"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," added Wing's CEO, Adam Woodworth.
The partnership reports that this robot-to-drone model should negate the need for businesses to invest in additional infrastructure to support wider-range deliveries, while also indicating that costs for service operators and customers could be lowered. The length of the pilot has not been revealed.
Source: Serve Robotics
