Serve Robotics operates a state-of-the-art, AI-powered, autonomous fleet of delivery robots in Los Angeles. And they have big plans to expand. But this autonomous revolution is still very much powered by humans. Here’s a rare look behind the scenes.
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TechTranscript
00:00 This is exciting.
00:01 Shirzon.
00:04 Shirzon.
00:05 I hope I pronounced that right.
00:06 Shirzon is a delivery robot operated by a startup
00:09 called Serv Robotics.
00:12 Super curious what's inside this thing.
00:14 Serv thinks automation can help meet the massive demand
00:16 for delivery in the US without adding more cars on the road.
00:20 And it claims its robots have reached level four autonomy,
00:23 meaning that in the right conditions,
00:25 they can fully pilot themselves.
00:28 No humans involved.
00:30 But that's not the full story.
00:32 All right, I'm sweating here.
00:34 I'm at a small, nondescript warehouse
00:43 in Hollywood, California, where a fleet of delivery robots
00:46 are getting ready for their next shift.
00:48 A few of Serv's human employees are making sure
00:52 the tires have enough air, the sensors are clean,
00:55 and the batteries are charged.
00:57 Serv is running a pilot program with about 50 robots
01:01 out of this garage/R&D lab.
01:04 Each bot is waist high and the size of a shopping cart.
01:07 It can carry about 50 pounds worth of food or other goods.
01:10 And yes, it looks kind of like WALL-E from Pixar.
01:13 We're the leader in autonomous sidewalk delivery in cities.
01:18 Serv spun out of app-based delivery service Postmates
01:21 about six years ago on a pretty big promise.
01:24 Use a medium-sized robot instead of a full-size car
01:28 to make food deliveries.
01:29 Or as Serv likes to put it,
01:31 why deliver two-pound burritos in two-ton cars?
01:34 The company's partnered with Uber Eats
01:36 and makes dozens of deliveries in Los Angeles every day.
01:40 It's a humble-looking operation, but Serv has big plans.
01:43 It's going public through a reverse merger
01:46 with a blank check company,
01:47 hoping to raise up to $30 million in new funding
01:51 for 2,000 more robots in multiple cities
01:53 across North America.
01:55 There's no question America is hungry for delivery,
01:58 but robot delivery?
02:00 There's a lot of excitement and a lot of fear around AI.
02:02 Things like chat GPT and self-driving cars
02:05 are giving a lot of people future shock.
02:08 Where are we heading with all this?
02:10 We know where the delivery bots are headed.
02:12 They're coming to your apartment
02:14 and they're bringing tacos.
02:16 - It's currently heading towards us,
02:18 coming down Melrose right now.
02:20 I can see it, let's go.
02:22 - So does Serv have the expertise
02:24 to conquer sidewalks across the country?
02:26 We tagged along on a delivery here in Hollywood
02:28 to see for ourselves.
02:30 And Hollywood followed along too.
02:32 - Hey, what's the name of this?
02:35 - Shears On.
02:36 - Everybody go get your shears on today.
02:38 - They got fans all over the place, I love this.
02:41 It's going kind of fast.
02:43 It's kind of going kind of jerky.
02:47 It's going, it's stopping, it's going, it's stopping.
02:49 And maybe it knows something that we don't.
02:52 So how did Shears On do?
02:53 Overall, I'd give it a B minus.
02:56 It was extremely cautious at intersections,
02:58 which makes sense.
02:59 - All right, yielded for that car
03:00 coming into the parking lot.
03:01 That's probably smart.
03:02 - Its speed was a little hard to predict,
03:04 sometimes fast, but mostly very, very slow.
03:07 - We're almost there.
03:08 You can make it.
03:09 - And it seemed to freeze awkwardly here and there.
03:12 - We're in the street, come on, buddy.
03:16 You gotta get out of the street.
03:18 - When we got to the destination,
03:19 the customer who placed the order
03:21 didn't want to be on camera.
03:23 Luckily, it was lunchtime and we were all pretty hungry.
03:26 So we opened up Uber Eats.
03:27 - A Melrose wrap with white pita.
03:30 - Ordered a bunch of food
03:31 and then waited at Serv's garage for our delivery.
03:33 - No need to tip when you get matched
03:34 with our eco-friendly autonomous cars and robots.
03:37 Got it.
03:37 - Yeah, we made the poor robot return
03:40 all the way back to its home base
03:41 so we could film the pickup.
03:43 We're monsters.
03:44 - Wow, that's a lot of food.
03:47 - But there's a whole other part of this picture.
03:49 As the fleet of bots tools around Hollywood,
03:52 there's an equivalent fleet of humans
03:54 making level four autonomy happen.
03:56 After the break, we see what's going on behind the scenes.
04:00 While robot technology is helping delivery businesses
04:04 work more efficiently,
04:05 MetaforWorks Mixed and Virtual Reality
04:07 is helping businesses all over the world
04:09 collaborate remotely.
04:10 Companies today can use MR and VR
04:13 to train employees in immersive environments
04:15 and even prototype directly in 3D,
04:17 which is safer and more cost-effective for your business
04:20 no matter the project.
04:21 Meta doesn't influence our editorial videos,
04:23 but they do help us make future-facing videos
04:25 like this possible.
04:26 All right, enough from me.
04:27 Back to the story.
04:28 As the residents of Hollywood watch Serv's robots
04:33 cruise around their neighborhood,
04:34 there's something they don't see.
04:37 A team of very human collaborators,
04:39 mechanics and software engineers and repair technicians
04:43 keeping the fleet operational.
04:45 And while the bots are out on delivery,
04:47 they have Shadows, a crew of specialists
04:49 who watch from afar and swoop in when there's trouble.
04:53 I actually am a people watcher outside of Serv,
04:56 so this is really fun for me.
04:59 First, there are the remote supervisors like T.
05:02 These employees sit for hours in front of live feeds
05:04 from the robots' many cameras.
05:06 They watch up to six robots at a time
05:08 and can monitor up to 20 robots each day.
05:11 At some points when I have multiple robots,
05:13 I'm actually going robot to robot to robot to robot,
05:16 and I just keep a cycle going through.
05:19 Part of our policies is like,
05:22 you should never really have your eyes off of a robot.
05:25 I'm just staring at everything,
05:27 just bouncing back and forth in like a rotation.
05:30 Supervisors give the go-ahead to cross intersections,
05:33 and they can take over the robots' movements if needed
05:36 with a literal PlayStation controller.
05:39 Are there moments where you're like,
05:40 "Okay, this could be bad,
05:41 but I wanna see how it plays out,"
05:43 and so maybe you wait a second just to make a decision first?
05:45 Absolutely not.
05:46 Okay.
05:47 As much as we would love to trust harmony,
05:50 I am more confident in my decision-making, so.
05:55 Erring on the side of caution, essentially.
05:57 Gotcha.
05:58 Now, Serv wouldn't let us film the screens it uses
06:01 to monitor the bots,
06:02 but here are some clips they provided.
06:04 There are three live camera views,
06:06 a map with all the robots' locations,
06:08 and a little tab status feed with a list of actions
06:11 that remote supervisors can choose from.
06:14 If someone starts harassing the robot, for example,
06:16 supervisors can tell it to play dead.
06:19 When the pedestrians or the public
06:21 is interacting like that with our robots,
06:23 they just go completely dead
06:25 until whatever is happening to them stops.
06:27 Supervisors are also instructed
06:29 to prioritize safety over everything else.
06:32 At each station, there's a big red physical button
06:34 that stops the robot dead in its tracks.
06:37 And if they ever have to put a robot in harm's way
06:39 to protect a human, so be it.
06:41 There's probably an iRobot reference here somewhere,
06:43 but I'll let you decide.
06:45 Safety is first.
06:47 Safety to the public and safety
06:50 to really anything interacting with our robots.
06:53 We have a saying that robots are replaceable,
06:56 human life isn't.
06:57 T can use her PlayStation controller
07:00 to get the robots out of minor scrapes,
07:02 but when things go more wrong,
07:04 the bots need boots on the ground.
07:06 And that's where Jacopo,
07:07 one of CERV's field agents, comes in.
07:09 When T or another supervisor flags
07:12 a stranded or disabled robot,
07:14 Jacopo hops on his electric bike
07:15 and races out to the scene.
07:17 So sometimes the merchant needs a little help
07:19 to load the robot.
07:20 Every now and then we have a flat tire.
07:23 The biggest danger to the bots, says Jacopo,
07:25 is what we'll call curiosity run amok.
07:28 You need to get people used to the robot.
07:30 So you know there is a curiosity in different ways.
07:33 There's curiosity like, oh, it's so cute,
07:35 but some people maybe like to be fun.
07:37 Every now and then we have a person flipping a robot,
07:40 so we go ahead and rescue the robot.
07:43 CERV says it's rare for the bots
07:45 to be harassed or attacked,
07:46 and we certainly didn't see any untoward behavior
07:49 in our day with them.
07:49 But they do attract attention,
07:51 and the more sensational incidents make the rounds.
07:54 Now at 5.30, Hollywood's food delivery robots
07:56 are under attack.
07:57 There's even a viral TikTok account
07:59 dedicated to capturing the bots' shenanigans,
08:02 and oddly berating them like an angry parent.
08:05 There's only but so much space.
08:07 You better slow down, right?
08:09 All of this leaves CERV facing twin challenges.
08:12 How to solve the engineering and logistical challenges
08:15 around autonomy, and how to prove to the public
08:17 that it's all worth it.
08:19 The aha moment was that you can use the technology
08:22 for self-driving cars and solve a really big problem
08:26 already by changing the form factor.
08:30 A lot of folks have been thinking about
08:32 how to get rid of the steering wheel
08:35 versus what we should be thinking about
08:37 is how to get rid of the car.
08:39 Ali Khashoggi founded CERV
08:40 while working at Postmates about six years ago.
08:43 When Uber acquired the company in 2020,
08:45 he spun the robotics division out as its own startup.
08:48 And he's actually pretty sober-minded about autonomy.
08:51 What we have right now is more like iPhone 1,
08:53 and there is all the way to iPhone 15 to go.
08:56 So the involvement today might be
08:59 more than it's gonna be in the future,
09:01 but there's gonna be humans in the loop
09:03 in one way or another.
09:05 Meaning CERV's bots may never graduate
09:08 from level four autonomy.
09:09 They might get better at dealing with intersections
09:12 or rowdy dogs, but they'll always need a human backstop.
09:15 Level five is when you never need people to help a robot.
09:19 And that's, as far as I'm concerned, sci-fi.
09:21 I don't think any company is seriously
09:23 going after level five.
09:24 More than that, says Ali, for the amount of money
09:27 it'd take to engineer perfect level five robots,
09:30 might as well just keep some human babysitters
09:32 on the payroll instead.
09:34 Do you really need to make it 100% autonomous?
09:36 Because at one point, the incremental returns of doing so
09:39 just doesn't make that much economic sense.
09:41 For what it's worth, dialing in the perfect degree
09:44 of autonomy doesn't answer the bigger,
09:46 more basic questions about this whole thing.
09:49 Why robots?
09:51 Why flood our already packed cities with machines
09:53 that the public may embrace or dismiss or attack?
09:57 The world is addicted to cars, Ali says,
09:59 and again trots out his favorite line.
10:01 - The thinking behind this is,
10:02 why move a two pound Boeing or a two ton car?
10:05 - The trouble is, lots of other tech startups
10:08 have made similar sounding promises
10:10 about reducing the number of cars on the road.
10:12 Uber and Lyft, electric scooters.
10:14 Yet so far, nothing has made a dent
10:17 in America's love affair with the car.
10:19 Studies have shown that Uber and Lyft
10:21 have actually led to an increase in vehicle miles traveled.
10:24 And there's some evidence that people
10:26 are using electric scooters
10:27 instead of riding public transportation or walking.
10:30 It's difficult to imagine Surv's robots
10:32 succeeding where others have failed.
10:35 Ali disagrees.
10:37 - We are literally taking a car trip
10:40 and moving it out of the streets,
10:41 especially when it wasn't necessary,
10:43 but it was just moving a few pounds
10:45 or like, let's say two bags of shopping.
10:47 I think there's good reason to argue
10:50 that we are going to remove cars
10:51 and actually help solve that problem.
10:55 All right, get on with it, bar.
10:56 There you go.
10:57 - For one final take on this,
10:59 we tracked down the guy making all those TikToks
11:01 about the robots.
11:02 We expected him to be as negative as he is in his videos,
11:05 but he was actually super diplomatic.
11:07 - Listen, I live for those moments
11:09 when somebody messes with them
11:10 and somebody flips them over.
11:11 They get themselves in little trouble,
11:13 ditches and stuff,
11:14 but quite honestly, they're pretty sophisticated.
11:17 - You don't see any hostility or anything like that?
11:19 - No, I mean, I think they try to portray it,
11:21 and even myself, I portray it that way on the internet,
11:23 but quite honestly,
11:25 people don't really have any hostility toward them.
11:29 - He's used to the bots
11:30 and says the neighborhood is too.
11:32 It's the autonomous revolution made mundane.
11:36 Though, if he looks closely enough,
11:39 it's not the robots he sees.
11:41 - To be honest with you,
11:42 I feel like I recognize the way they sort of,
11:46 their behaviors,
11:46 only because there's a human often behind it.
11:49 And I have a feeling they're matched up
11:50 with individual robots that handle individual areas.
11:54 So you just start seeing some of the characteristics.
11:56 I have fun with them.
11:57 - Okay.
11:58 - I got a kick out of them, so.
11:59 - Yeah.
12:00 - We've been through so much together.
12:04 Cheers, Lon, you and I.
12:06 I feel like we have a bond.
12:08 And I wish you the best of luck in all your endeavors.