The food delivery company just introduced Serve, an autonomous delivery robot Today if you order something through Postmates, a human will arrive at your doorstep, food in tow. This time next year, a robot might show up in its place. The San Francisco-based delivery company makes around 4 million deliveries every month across 550 cities?most of them through its fleet of car-driving delivery people.
Now it wants to replace?or at the very least, augment?those human workers with Serve, a friendly looking rover that will begin delivering food in Los Angeles in 2019. Serve is a four-wheeled autonomous robot that?s designed to navigate city sidewalks on its quest to deliver goods to your doorstep.

Postmates

With a body like a shopping cart and a face that vaguely resembles Wall-E, Serve looks intentionally amiable. The little rover, which can carry upwards of 50 pounds of cargo, is packed with sensors including LIDAR, GPS, sonar, and a computer vision camera that helps it get around without causing too much trouble on pedestrian pathways. According to Postmates, Serve will act as a helpful hand to the company?s human workers, who at this point must drive to a restaurant or store, find parking, pick up the food, drive to the delivery location, and find parking again. All this for what often amounts to a single meal.

Postmates

Serve aims to reduce the amount of driving involved in delivering a cheeseburger by sending the rover into a ...