Wing—a drone delivery startup owned by Google parent Alphabet—has been making deliveries in North Texas for years for companies like Walmart and Walgreens. But until now, a human has had to be the one loading purchases into the drones. In another win for our future machine overlords, that’s about to change with the arrival of San Francisco-based Serve Robotics (Nasdaq:SERV), a leading sidewalk robot delivery company.

Today, Serve announced that it’s partnering with Mountain View, California-based Wing to expand “eco-friendly, autonomous food delivery” by pairing its rolling sidewalk delivery robots with Wing’s high-flying drones. 

In the coming months, select Wing restaurant deliveries—including in the Dallas area—will be picked up by a Serve delivery robot from the curbside of participating restaurants. The food order will then be autonomously rolled to a Wing drone AutoLoader a few blocks away. The Serve robot will then lift the order onto the AutoLoader—where it can be plucked skyward by a hovering Wing drone and delivered to customers “as much as 6 miles away.”

A Wing drone hovers at the AutoLoader, where it will pick up a delivery from a Serve robot for aerial delivery. [Photo: Serve Robotics]

Serve said the robot-to-drone delivery partnership “will enable merchants to tap into drone delivery without any changes to their facilities or workflow and significantly extend the delivery area for sidewalk delivery robots.” The collaboration aims to serve as an “important step toward enabling highly automated delivery as the preferred mode of delivery for the millions of small packages delivered every day around the world.”

Dr. Ali Kashani, Serve’s co-founder and CEO, said his company is “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.”

“Together, Serve and Wing share an ambitious vision for reliable and affordable robotic delivery at scale,” Kashani added in a statement. “Our end-to-end robotic delivery solution will be the most efficient mode for the significant majority of deliveries.”

By leveraging the strengths of both technologies, Serve and Wing said they will enable faster, safer, and more reliable delivery. [Photo: Serve Robotics]

Wing CEO Adam Woodworth noted that his company has been delivering food and other goods directly to consumers for over five years—completing more than 400,000 commercial deliveries across three continents.

“We have a proven ability to make deliveries quickly and efficiently,” he added in a statement. “Both Wing and Serve offer innovative solutions that are changing the way goods are delivered. 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.”

Per Serve, benefits of robot-to-drone delivery include:

:: Faster deliveries, since the robots roll down traffic-free sidwalks and drones zip high above traffic snarls below.

:: Efficient costs for both the operator and consumer, since there’s “no need for tipping.”

:: Sustainability, since both the robots and drones are electric, spewing no emissions.

:: Safety, since they keep vehicles off roads.

:: Convenience, because curbside robotic package pickup “allows merchants to access drone delivery without modifying their facilities or installing new equipment.”

Partnering with Uber Eats for 2,000 delivery robots

Serve was founded in 2017 as the robotics division of Postmates. It was spun off by Uber in 2021 as an independent company, and has completed “tens of thousands of deliveries” for partners including Uber Eats and 7-Eleven. Currently, its scalable multi-year contracts include an agreement to deploy up to 2,000 delivery robots on the Uber Eats platform across multiple U.S. markets.

Spying its robots rolling down Dallas-area sidewalks may soon surprise some—but not all. As Dallas Innovates has reported, sidewalk delivery robots from Starship Technologies began delivering food to students and faculty at UT Dallas in 2019 and  rolling orders from nine eateries on the SMU campus in 2022. 

What’s next? Who knows—maybe people in Dallas will get their own home robots to open the Wing delivery and eat the food inside—cutting out the human element entirely. (If that happens, we’ll let you know.)

You can see a YouTube video of a Serve and Wing delivery in action by going here.

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