Serve Robotics and Wing will test robot-to-drone delivery in Dallas

Drones and sidewalk delivery robots promise to make last-mile deliveries cheaper and more efficient, but both have their limitations. Drones have trouble landing in dense urban areas, and sidewalk works rattle after a few miles. Uber-backed Serve Robotics and Alphabet’s Wing are betting that joining forces might just create the best automated last-mile delivery service.

In the coming months, they plan to trial a robot-to-drone delivery relay in Dallas.

Serve CEO Ali Kashani told TechCrunch that the partnership could potentially expand the company’s delivery area, which is currently limited to about two miles. It could also allow retailers to use drone deliveries without making any changes to their facilities or workflow.

Here’s how it will work.

A select number of customer orders will be picked up by a service bot at the curbside of a single restaurant or store and delivered several blocks away. The robots will then pass the food stick to a single “AutoLoader” in the wing, where it can be picked up by a Wing drone and delivered to customers up to six miles away.

“If you look at delivery as it is today, it is always multimodal,” Kashani said. “Drones and robots have a very non-overlapping profile, with robots typically making sense in denser urban environments… while drones have limitations in these environments. You need real estate to show up in front of the restaurant and grab the item (via drone). So in this case, these two things complement each other really well because they can offer customers and sellers a more complete solution where all deliveries, both short and long distance, can be automated.”

Kashani also noted that robot drops will be asynchronous with drone pickups. He said the robot would drop the package on the AutoLoader and the drone would be able to catch it at any time.

Details of the process are sparse. Neither Serve nor Wing would say how many of their bots and drones would be involved, where the autoloaders and other supporting infrastructure would be located, or which retailer would be the first to try the experiment. Oddly enough, when asked, Wing told TechCrunch that it would be an existing channel partner of Serve, and Serve told TechCrunch that it would be an existing channel partner of Wing.

Wing CEO Adam Woodworth, who made the announcement at the exclusive Up Summit event in Bentonville, Ark., told attendees that the two companies have already started working on integrating their technologies.

“So you can think about what this workflow would look like in a store or at a retailer in the inner city, taking out a box and then going out and extending the whole service by tens of miles of range,” Woodworth said. Additionally, Wing showcased its newest drone at the Up Summit and announced that it is introducing it to the healthcare sector.

You deliver to approximately 300 restaurants in Los Angeles via the Uber Eats and 7-Eleven platforms, and you recently started delivering for Shake Shack. Wing has partnered with Walmart in Dallas and has piloted a drone delivery project for DoorDash and Wendy’s in Virginia.

A Wing spokesman said the partnership would not involve Walmart.

Sometimes these pilots grow into an actual commercial enterprise. For now, it may be more of an experiment as Serve and Wing test whether there’s a real business case for providing drones and bots.

The partnership comes nearly six months after Serve went public in a reverse merger, bringing in gross revenues of $40 million. The company recently raised another $20 million in a private placement and warrant exercise.

Serve’s CFO, Brian Read, told TechCrunch that the company has enough cash to meet its goal 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 thanks to an agreement with Uber Eats.