A new joint venture between Serve Robotics sidewalk delivery robots and Alphabet's Wing flying drone service will do a dual test run. Both tech companies hope that flying and sidewalk drones can cover areas its counterpart can't and speed up delivery times. TechCrunch reported that Serve Robotics and Wing will start making deliveries in Dallas sometime in the coming months. The test will include a select number of customer orders being delivered by a combination of sidewalk robots and flying drones. One of the biggest challenges for drone delivery is coverage.

A new joint venture between Uber's Serve Robotics sidewalk delivery drones and Alphabet's Wing flying drone service will do a dual test run. Both tech companies hope that flying and sidewalk drones can cover areas its counterpart can't and speed up delivery times. TechCrunch reported that Serve Robotics and Wing will start making deliveries in Dallas, Texas sometime in the coming months. The test will include a select number of customer orders being delivered by a combination of sidewalk and flying drones. One of the biggest challenges for drone delivery is coverage.

Three days before Christmas 2022, Amazon Prime Air was set to deliver its first commercial package by drone to a residential customer in Lockeford, California. It was supposed to be a celebration, a culmination of tens of thousands of test flights, years of dealing with Federal Aviation Administration paperwork, a decade of development, and $2 billion of investment. Early that morning, about 40 people--including FAA officials, Amazon engineers, public relations staff, and Prime Air chief pilot Jim Mullin--waited outside a steel frame warehouse on a flat, 20-acre parcel of land flanked by vineyards. Inside the warehouse, a flight crew had loaded the drone--a six-propeller, roughly 80-pound carbon-fiber MK27-2--with a lithium-ion battery and a box containing an Exploding Kittens card game. But when the operator in charge tried to load the flight package, the software wouldn't boot up, says a former employee who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation: "That's when panic started to set in, and the higher-ups went into war-room mode."