A growing fleet of delivery robots serving more areas in Los Angeles

Serve Robotics has deployed more than 500 sidewalk delivery robots across 40 Los Angeles neighborhoods, up from just two neighborhoods in 2023, as the California company races to prove that autonomous machines can replace human couriers.

- BY NILESH CHRISTOPHER

THE NAMES on Serve Robotics delivery robots are computer-generated to avoid duplication across the U.S.

(MYUNG J. CHUN Los Angeles Times)

The company, which spun out of Uber’s Postmates in 2021, has expanded to six metropolitan areas covering 20 cities nationally, Ali Kashani, Serve’s chief executive, told The Times. In Los Angeles, there are now Serve bots serving South-Central, Del Rey, Little Tokyo and elsewhere.

He described the milestone as “an overnight success built over a long time,” noting that the project began in 2017.

Los Angeles is the second-largest food delivery market after New York and was Serve’s founding territory because of its car-dependent culture and high delivery density. It was also one of the first cities to allow the delivery bots.

The Los Angeles fleet runs on its most advanced Gen-3 robot, which carries onboard Nvidia chips providing five times the processing power of the previous model.

The additional computing power allows the machine to identify a broader range of obstacles, from bus shelters to specific types of vegetation.