A new joint venture between Serve Robotics sidewalk delivery robots and Alphabet’s Wing flying drone service will do a dual test run. Both tech companies hope that flying and sidewalk drones can cover areas its counterpart can’t and speed up delivery times.
TechCrunch reported that Serve Robotics and Wing will start making deliveries in Dallas sometime in the coming months. The test will include a select number of customer orders being delivered by a combination of sidewalk robots and flying drones.
One of the biggest challenges for drone delivery is coverage. Flying drones can only travel a certain distance away from its headquarters. Sidewalk drones can find it hard to navigate densely populated areas and certain rocky terrains. Drone companies often have to upgrade their facilities to meet these distances and obstacles.
Serve Robotics and Wing’s idea is to use both types of robots for delivering orders to cover areas traditional delivery services cannot. A road-based Serve bot picks up the order from a restaurant and carts the food to an “AutoLoader” where the Wing drone, a flying drone that can carry five pounds and fly at speeds up to 65 mph, picks up the order and completes the delivery.
It’s not known which restaurants or merchants will be part of the test, the areas in Dallas where the drones will deliver orders and any post-test plans for the new drone delivery fleet. Serve Robotics already makes deliveries for 300 restaurants in Los Angeles. Wing also works with Walmart in Dallas and participated in a pilot program with DoorDash and Wendy’s in Virginia.
Correction, October 2 2024, 1:00PM ET: This story originally stated that Serve Robotics was an Uber company. Originally, Serve Robotics was part of Uber but was spun out into an independent company several years ago. We apologize for the error.