This story originally appeared on FLYING.COM.
Self-flying drones and self-driving aircraft are joining forces to deliver your burrito.
On Tuesday, Wing, the drone delivery arm of Google parent Alphabet, and Serve Robotics, a manufacturer of sidewalk delivery robots, announced a pilot partnership in Dallas, where Wing has been delivering hot food, beverages, household staples and other items since April 2022.
The drone delivery firm since August 2023 has been working with the world’s largest retailer, Walmart, to expand that service to an estimated 1.8 million households in Texas’ Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.
And now that the FAA has authorized Wing and competitor Zipline to manage their own airspace in North Texas, enabling deliveries beyond the visual line of sight of the pilot, the company’s delivery network has the potential to be one of the world’s largest.
“We have been delivering food and other goods directly to consumers for over five years, completing more than 400,000 commercial deliveries across three continents,” said Adam Woodworth, CEO of Wing. “We have a proven ability to make deliveries quickly and efficiently. … 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.”
To support its growing coverage area, which according to Walmart will soon cover three-quarters of the area’s population, Wing is enlisting Serve and its autonomous sidewalk robots.
In the next few months, certain Wing deliveries will instead be picked up by a Serve robot from the restaurant’s curbside. The self-driving robot will travel a few blocks to a Wing Autoloader, which can grab deliveries from the vehicle on its own and position them to be picked up by drone.
Typically, Wing relies on store associates to drop orders curbside for the AutoLoader, but there isn’t always room for restaurants to install a drone operation on-site.
Once the drone picks up the order, it can fly as far as 6 miles. According to the partners, the combined system will enable 30-minute deliveries to the entire city.
“Together, Serve and Wing share an ambitious vision for reliable and affordable robotic delivery at scale,” said Ali Kashani, CEO and co-founder of Serve. “Our end-to-end robotic delivery solution will be the most efficient mode for the significant majority of deliveries.”
Wing believes adding Serve robots will make its deliveries faster, avoiding gridlock by traveling both in the air and on the sidewalk. Both vehicles are fully electric, and because they are automated, there is no need for the customer to tip. Restaurants, meanwhile, do not need to make any changes to their facilities to accommodate Wing drones.
At a Walmart Supercenter in the Dallas suburb of Frisco, for example, Wing’s operation requires the space of about two rows of parking lots — which isn’t much, but the company seeks to be as asset-light as possible.
The firm also aims to make customers’ lives easier via integrations with DoorDash and the Walmart app, allowing them to place orders through a familiar interface. Serve, meanwhile, has a partnership with Uber Eats in Los Angeles, a market Wing has yet to tap into.
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