Over the past few years, food delivery has grown into a multibillion-dollar market where tech giants such as Amazon.com Inc. compete with heavily funded startups for orders. One of the latter, Postmates Inc., hopes to gain an edge by enlisting robots to assist its human couriers.

The delivery startup, which is valued at $1.2 billion, today unveiled an autonomous rover called Serve that it plans to use for short-distance trips. Postmates will roll out its first robotic fleet in Los Angeles with an eye toward expanding into other major U.S. cities over the next year.

The Serve rover stands just over three feet high and can travel up to 30 miles per charge with as much as 50 pounds of goods in its compact cargo bay. Under the hood, a complicated array of sensors collect environmental data to help the robot safely navigate busy cities. Serve maps out its surroundings with a combination of cameras, GPS, sonar and LiDAR sensors much like those used in self-driving cars.

The data from these sensors is fed into an onboard Nvidia Corp. Xavier chip, which officially started shipping Wednesday, that runs the rover’s artificial intelligence brains. The software not only handles navigation but also controls a light strip at the top of the robot that functions as a turn signal. On the front, a pair of large “eyes” help indicate the direction where the rover is headed. 

Postmates said a Serve rover can make about a dozen deliveries a day. The company will use its upcoming robotic fleets to pick up items from restaurants and deliver them to human couriers, who can then make the last-mile trip to the buyer.

“It’s designed to work alongside the existing Postmates fleet to move small objects over short distances efficiently,” the startup wrote in a blog post. “A Postmate [courier] wouldn’t have to navigate a dense urban neighborhood searching for parking. Serve could instantly pick up orders and transport them a few blocks to a Postmate away from occupied parking spaces and traffic.”

Postmates joins a growing list of startups experimenting with delivery robots. Starship Technologies Inc., a company founded 2014 by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, recently launched what is hailed as the world’s first commercial robotic delivery service in a small English town. And Berkeley, California-based Kiwi Campus Inc. is building an autonomous delivery fleet of its own.

Photo: Postmates