Your Next Postmates Order May Be Delivered by This Robotic Stroller

Postmates is an on-demand delivery service app similar to GrubHub and Uber Eats. But, unlike with those services, Postmates users can order items from practically any store — not just participating restaurants. That means that a large portion of Postmates deliveries are being picked up from convenience stores and delivered to customers within just a mile or two. Customers are willing to pay for the convenience, but it is wasteful when delivered by car. That’s why Postmates has created Serve, a little robot stroller that will deliver goods to customers’ doors.

Serve is a wheeled robot equipped with an insulated bin. When it reaches a restaurant or store, employees simply drop the order in the bin and Serve will start its journey. Using a host of sensors, including a Velodyne LiDAR system normally used on autonomous cars, Serve will navigate the city’s sidewalks to reach the customer. Serve can carry up to 50 pounds of cargo and travel as far as 25 miles on a single charge, which is enough for several hours worth of deliveries.

The question is how other pedestrians will respond to autonomous robots roaming around on their sidewalks — an issue which cities like San Francisco are taking seriously. San Francisco has already enacted a partial ban on delivery robots similar to Serve, but Postmates is hoping to change that with a number of features designed to make Serve friendly to other pedestrians. Those include safety features, programming that tells Serve to yield to humans, and external indicators that tell pedestrians where Serve is intending to go. Serve will be tested in several cities over the next year, starting with Los Angeles, so your next Postmates order may just be delivered by a robot.