Serve Robotics Plans Connectivity and Data Services for Robot Developers

Serve Robotics plans to sell connectivity and data tools to other robotics firms through a new business line, extending technology developed for its own robots to developers working in less controlled settings.

Physical AI Services, announced Thursday, Nov. 5, will include three planned offerings. Serve presented the business line alongside its third-quarter earnings update, positioning the products for developers building robots for places such as farms, warehouses and other environments that are not tightly controlled.

One tool, Serve Link, will connect robots in the field to AI systems running in data centers. That setup is intended to let companies draw on computing resources away from the robot, rather than running all of the processing onboard. Serve says Link is designed to keep connections reliable across networks that can be unstable in the field.

A second offering is a data-curation tool for finding edge cases, or unusual situations, in real-world robot data. Those examples can be fed into training models to help improve robot performance. The third product is a catalog of real-world records collected by Serve’s sidewalk robots, intended to help AI models interpret complex environments shared with people.

Serve said Bedrock Robotics is a customer of the planned offering. Bedrock develops autonomous systems for construction machinery. Serve also announced work with T-Mobile to bring AI computing closer to robots.

Serve co-founder and CEO Ali Kashani has described the expansion as a way to make technology developed for the company’s own robots available to other builders. He has said that as robotics advances, more companies will want to develop similar systems for uses such as farming and warehousing.

Serve makes sidewalk delivery robots and a robot designed for hospital use that it obtained through its acquisition of Diligent Robotics. Kashani has said those existing operations will continue as Serve expands its business to include tools for outside developers.