Ouster, Serve Robotics Sign Multi-Year Agreement to Expand Robot Delivery Fleets
January 20, 2022
Ouster and Serve Robotics have announced a strategic customer agreement that includes a binding commitment for OS digital lidar sensors through 2023, along with a non-binding forecast for additional sensors through 2025 as Serve Robotics scales its delivery fleets across U.S. cities and beyond.
Serve Robotics said it plans to outfit each of its next-generation delivery robots with an Ouster OS1 sensor. The digital lidar is fused into the robot’s autonomy stack to locate its precise position and simultaneously generate a real-time 3D map of its surrounding environment so it can navigate more safely and efficiently on city sidewalks alongside pedestrians and other road users.
“Ouster’s lidar has been instrumental in helping us achieve major technical and commercial milestones,” said Euan Abraham, vice president of hardware engineering of Serve Robotics. “We have been working with Ouster for well over a year and continue to be impressed by the ongoing performance improvements, quality, and reliability of its digital technology. We feel confident that Ouster is the right company to scale with us as we move into this next phase of market expansion with Level 4 autonomy delivering for several new commercial partners.”
Serve said its fleet of next-generation robots will expand into additional geographies as it rolls out delivery service for Uber Eats and other partners in 2022. The company said autonomous delivery represents a significant opportunity to capture an estimated $1.8 billion total addressable market for lidar in the robotics industry by 2025.
“Serve Robotics is one of our longest standing customers and one of the first to commercially deploy AV technology in a real-world environment alongside pedestrians and vehicles,” said Nate Dickerman, Ouster’s president of field operations. “We are thrilled to further solidify our relationship with multi-year strategic customer agreement and Serve scales the production and deployment of its sidewalk delivery robots.”
For more details on Ouster’s technologies, visit its website here.
