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A new corporate partnership will attempt to use robots to deliver food to drones, which will then deliver the goods to humans (supposedly). It’s like DoorDash, except machines do everything but make the food. It’s worth pondering when the robot chefs will arrive, thus nixing human labor from the supply chain completely.
Serve Robotics, which is backed by Uber, is teaming up with Wing, which is owned by Alphabet (the parent company of Google). The partnership, which was announced in a press release from Serve Robotics on Tuesday, will be trialed in the Dallas area over the next few months. Those first few deliveries will start with one of Serve’s delivery robots picking up a customer’s order from a local restaurant. After that, the bot will take the food to a Wing drone stationed nearby, which will then allow for “aerial delivery to customers as much as 6 miles away.” The companies hope the partnership will allow Serve’s delivery radius—which is currently limited to approximately two miles—to expand.
“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 Dr. Ali Kashani, Serve’s CEO and co-founder.
In his own statement, Wing CEO Adam Woodworth claimed that his company, which completed its first deliveries in 2014, had now completed “400,000 commercial deliveries across three continents.” He added that he hoped the new partnership would allow the company to reach “more merchants in highly-congested areas while supporting Serve” as it expands its business.
Gizmodo reached out to Serve Robotics and Wing for more information.
Robotics and artificial intelligence are powerful technologies that could, if leveraged correctly, have wondrous applications for the human race. However, corporate America’s main priority so far has been to use the technology to cut down on workforces and make corporations as “autonomous” (and, thus, as worker-free) as possible. Eventually, if enough companies follow that track, there won’t be enough people with the buying power to buy their services.
