Uber is doubling down on efforts to make use of autonomous automobiles for its supply service.

The corporate introduced as we speak a 10-year partnership with Nuro, an autonomous electrical automobile maker. Uber Eats and Nuro will launch the supply providing this fall in Mountain View, California, and Houston, Texas, with plans to later increase its service to the higher Bay Space.

Uber has been turning to partnerships to cement its presence within the autonomous last-mile supply area. The corporate is testing autonomous automobile supply in Santa Monica via a take care of Motional. Uber spin-off Serve Robotics, which makes sidewalk supply robots, can also be working with Uber Eats on a Los Angeles pilot.

An Uber spokesperson tells Quick Firm that it’ll proceed to work with a number of third-party autonomous supply corporations fairly than contract with only one. “This third-party strategy permits us to scale Uber’s supply community, whereas working with leaders within the autonomous area,” the spokesperson says.

Based in 2016 by two former Waymo staff, Nuro’s autonomous automobiles aren’t the common automobile discovered on the street. The corporate constructed the bots particularly to hold meals and different items, and so they don’t have area for people onboard (or a steering wheel, at that). The small automobiles nonetheless journey on public roads, although, so distant Nuro operators can patch into the automobile and assume management if wanted.

Meals supply corporations have lengthy had a watch on utilizing autonomous automobiles and bots for last-mile supply. DoorDash, for instance, in 2021 revealed DoorDash Labs, its robotics and automation arm that was working in stealth for 3 years. Grubhub, owned by Simply Eat Takeaway, in June additionally introduced a partnership with self-driving robotics startup Cartken to ship items on school campuses.