- This is exciting.
Shirzan, Shirzan, I hope I pronounced that right.
Shirzan is a delivery robot operated
by a startup called Serve Robotics.
Super curious what's inside this thing.
Serve thinks automation can help meet the massive demand
for delivery in the US without adding more cars on the road.
And it claims its robots have reached level four autonomy
meaning that in the right conditions,
they can fully pilot themselves.
No humans involved, but that's not the full story.
Alright, I'm sweating.
(gentle music)
I'm at a small, nondescript warehouse
in Hollywood, California where a fleet
of delivery robots are getting ready for their next shift.
A few of Serve's human employees are making sure
the tires have enough air,
the sensors are clean and the batteries are charged.
Serve is running a pilot program
with about 50 robots out of this garage slash R&D lab.
Each bot is waist high in the size of a shopping cart.
It can carry about 50 pounds worth of food or other goods.
And yes, it looks kind of like Wall-E from Pixar.
- We're the leader in autonomous sidewalk delivery
in cities.
- Serve spun out of app-based delivery service Postmates
about six years ago on a pretty big promise.
Use a medium-sized robot instead of a full-sized car
to make food deliveries or as Serve likes to put it,
Why deliver two pound burritos in two ton cars?
The company's partnered with Uber Eats and makes dozens
of deliveries in Los Angeles every day.
It's a humble looking operation, but Serve has big plans.
It's going public through a reverse merger
with a blank check company hoping to raise up to $30 million
in new funding for 2000 more robots in multiple cities
across North America.
There's no question America is hungry for delivery
but robot delivery?
There's a lot of excitement and a lot of fear around AI.
Things like ChatGPT and self-driving cars are giving a lot
of people future shock.
Where are we heading with all this?
We know where the delivery bots are headed.
They're coming to your apartment and they're bringing tacos.
It's currently heading towards us
coming down Melrose right now.
I can see it, let's go.
So does Serve have the expertise
to conquer sidewalks across the country?
We tagged along on a delivery here in Hollywood to see
for ourselves and Hollywood followed along too.
- Hey, what's the name for it again?
- Shirzan.
- Everybody go get your Shirzan today.
- We got fans all over the place. I love this.
It's going kind of fast.
It's kind of going kind of jerky.
It's going, it's stopping, it's going,
it's stopping and maybe it knows something that we don't.
So how did Shirzan do?
Overall, I'd give it a B-.
It was extremely cautious at intersections
which makes sense.
Alright, yielded for that car coming into the parking lot.
That's probably smart.
Its speed was a little hard to predict, sometimes fast
but mostly very, very slow.
We're almost there, you can make it.
And it seemed to freeze awkwardly here and there.
We're in the street.
Come on buddy, you gotta get out of the street.
When we got to the destination, the customer
who placed the order didn't want to be on camera.
Luckily it was lunchtime and we were all pretty hungry
so we opened up Uber Eats.
A Melrose wrap with white pita.
Ordered a bunch of food and then waited at Serve's garage
for our delivery.
No need to tip when you get matched
with our eco-friendly autonomous cars and robots.
Got it.
Yeah, we made the poor robot return all the way back
to its home base so we could film the pickup.
We're monsters.
Wow, that's a lot of food.
But there's a whole other part of this picture.
As the fleet of bots tools around Hollywood
there's an equivalent fleet
of humans making level four autonomy happen.
After the break, we see what's going on behind the scenes.
As the residents of Hollywood watch Serve's robots
cruise around their neighborhood,
there's something they don't see.
A team of very human collaborators, mechanics
and software engineers
and repair technicians keeping the fleet operational.
And while the bots are out on delivery, they have shadows.
A crew of specialists who watch from afar
and swoop in when there's trouble.
- I actually am a people watcher outside of Serve
so this is really fun for me.
- First, there are the remote supervisors, like Tee.
These employees sit for hours
in front of live feeds from the robot's mini cameras.
They watch up to six robots at a time
and can monitor up to 20 robots each day.
- At some points when I have multiple robots,
I'm actually going robot to robot to robot
to robot and I just keep a cycle going through.
Part of our policies is like
you should never really have your eyes off of a robot.
I'm just staring at every single
like just bouncing back and forth in like a rotation.
- Supervisors give the go ahead to cross intersections
and they can take over the robot's movements
if needed with a literal PlayStation controller.
Are there moments where you're like, okay,
this could be bad, but I want to see how it plays out
and so maybe you wait a second
just to make a decision first.
- Absolutely not. - Okay.
- As much as we would love to trust autonomy,
I am more confident in my decision making so.
- Erring on the side of caution essentially.
- Mmm-hmm. - Gotcha.
Now, Serve wouldn't let us film the screens it uses
to monitor the bots
but here are some clips they provided.
There are three live camera views,
a map with all the robot's locations
and a little tab status feed with a list
of actions that remote supervisors can choose from.
If someone starts harassing the robot, for example,
supervisors can tell it to play dead.
- When the pedestrians or the public is interacting
like that with our robots, they just go completely dead
until like whatever's happening to 'em stops.
- Supervisors are also instructed to prioritize safety
over everything else.
At each station there's a big red physical button
that stops the robot dead in its tracks.
And if they ever have to put a robot
in harm's way to protect a human, so be it.
There's probably an "I, Robot" reference here somewhere
but I'll let you decide.
- Safety is first, safety to the public
and safety to really anything interacting with our robots.
We have a saying that, you know, robots are replaceable.
Human life isn't.
- Tee can use her PlayStation controller to get the robots
out of minor scrapes, but when things go more wrong
the bots need boots on the ground.
And that's where Jacopo,
one of Serve's field agents comes in.
When Tee or another supervisor flags a stranded
or disabled robot, Jacopo hops on his electric bike
and races out to the sea.
- So sometimes the merchant needs a little help
to load the robot.
Every now and then we have a flat tire.
- The biggest danger to the bots, says Jacopo,
is what we'll call curiosity run amok.
- We need to get people used to the robot.
So you know, there is a curiosity in different ways.
There's curiosity like, oh wow it's so cute,
but some people maybe like to be fun.
Every now and then we have a person flipping the robot
so we go ahead and rescue the robot.
- Serve says it's rare for the bots
to be harassed or attacked
and we certainly didn't see any untoward behavior in our day
with them, but they do attract attention
and the more sensational incidents make the rounds.
- [Reporter] Now at 5:30, Hollywood's food delivery robots
are under attack.
- There's even a viral TikTok account dedicated
to capturing the bot's shenanigans
and oddly berating them like an angry parent.
- [Speaker] There's only but so much space,
you better slow down, right.
- All of this leaves Serve facing twin challenges.
How to solve the engineering and logistical challenges
around autonomy and how to prove
to the public that it's all worth it.
- The aha moment was that you can use the technology
for self-driving cars and solve a really big problem already
by changing the form factor.
A lot of folks have been thinking about how to get rid
of the steering wheel
versus what we should be thinking about
is how to get rid of the car.
- Ali Kashani founded Serve while working at Postmates
about six years ago.
When Uber acquired the company in 2020,
he spun the robotics division out as its own startup
and he's actually pretty sober minded about autonomy.
- What we have right now is more like iPhone 1
and there is, you know, all the way to iPhone 15 to go.
So the involvement today might be more than it's gonna be
in the future, but there's gonna be humans
in the loop in one way or another.
- Meaning Serve's bots may never graduate
from level four autonomy.
They might get better at dealing with intersections
or rowdy dogs, but they'll always need a human backstop.
- Level five is when you never need people to help a robot
and that's as far as I'm concerned, sci-fi.
I don't think any company
is seriously going after level five.
- More than that, says Ali,
for the amount of money it takes
to engineer perfect level five robots.
Might as well just keep some human babysitters
on the payroll instead.
- Do you really need to make it 100% autonomous?
Because at one point the incremental returns
of doing so just doesn't make that much economic sense.
- For what it's worth, dialing in the perfect degree
of autonomy doesn't answer the bigger,
more basic questions about this whole thing.
Why robots?
Why flood our already packed cities with machines
that the public may embrace or dismiss or attack?
The world is addicted to cars, Ali says,
and again trots out his favorite line.
- The thinking behind this is why move a two pound burrito
in a two ton car.
- The trouble is, lots of other tech startups
have made similar sounding promises
about reducing the number of cars on the road.
Uber and Lyft, electric scooters.
Yet so far nothing has made a dent
in America's love affair with a car.
Studies have shown that Uber
and Lyft have actually led to an increase
in vehicle miles traveled and there's some evidence
that people are using electric scooters instead
of riding public transportation or walking.
It's difficult to imagine Serve's robots succeeding
where others have failed.
Ali disagrees.
- We are literally taking a car trip and moving it
out of the streets, especially when it wasn't necessary
but it was just moving a few pounds
or like let's say two bags of shopping.
I think there's good reason to argue
that we are going to remove cars and you know,
actually help solve that problem.
- Alright, get on with the bar.
There you go.
- For one final take on this, we tracked down
the guy making all those TikToks about the robots.
We expected him to be as negative as he is in his videos
but he was actually super diplomatic.
- Listen, I live for those moments
when somebody messes with them
and somebody flips 'em over,
they get themselves in little trouble, ditches and stuff
but quite honestly they're pretty sophisticated.
- You don't see any hostility or anything like that?
- No, I mean I think they try to portray, and even myself
I portray it that way on internet, but quite honestly
people don't really have any hostility toward.
- He's used to the bots and says the neighborhood is too.
It's the autonomous revolution made mundane.
Though, if he looks closely enough,
it's not the robots he sees.
- To be honest with you, I feel like
I recognize the way they sort of their behaviors
only because there's human often behind it
and I have a feeling they're matched up
with individual robots that handle individual areas.
So you just start seeing some of the characteristics.
I have fun with it.
Okay, I gotta kick off.
- Yeah.
We've been through so much together, cheers on you and I.
I feel like we have a bond
and I wish you the best of luck in all your endeavors.