If you walk down Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, you might come across something that seems out of place: a robot, about waist-high, with blinking eye-shaped headlights and its own name written on the side.
These robots are owned by Serve Robotics, a company that Emerged from the Postmates app-based delivery service about six years ago. For more than a year now, Serve has been working with Uber Eats to deliver food to thousands of people in Los Angeles as part of its ongoing experiment to see how artificial intelligence and robotics can transform the way we get our food.
Serve likes to promote its robots as “Level 4” autonomous, meaning they are capable of making all of their own decisions under certain circumstances. But behind the scenes, a small army of human helpers is ready to intervene when something goes wrong.
And sometimes it does. On TikTok, robots are often mocked, abused, and sometimes vandalized. They have become supporting characters in the long-running reality show known as Hollywood.
We spent the day with Serve’s robots and their human nannies, and spoke with the CEO to get a sense of whether on-demand robot delivery can really scale the way Serve envisions it, and to answer the question: why do we need delivery robots? ?
