Stroll down Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, and also you would possibly discover one thing that appears misplaced: a robotic, about waist excessive, with headlights formed like blinking eyes and its personal identify stenciled on the aspect.
These robots are owned by Serve Robotics, an organization that spun out of app-based supply service Postmates about six years in the past. For over a yr now, Serve has been working with Uber Eats to ship meals to 1000’s of individuals in Los Angeles as a part of its ongoing experiment to see how AI and robotics can remodel the best way we get our meals.
Serve likes to advertise its robots as “Degree 4” autonomous, which means they’re able to make all their very own selections beneath sure circumstances. However behind the scenes, a small military of human helpers stands able to step in when one thing goes flawed.
And generally it does. On TikTok, the robots are sometimes topic to ridicule, abuse, and sometimes vandalism. They’ve grow to be supporting characters within the long-running actuality present generally known as Hollywood.
We spent the day with Serve’s robots, and their human babysitters, and talked to the CEO to get a way of whether or not on-demand robotic supply can actually scale the best way Serve envisions, and to reply the query: why can we even want supply robots?
