Beware Delivery Boys & Girls – Robots & Drones Taking Over Your Food Delivery Job

Beware Delivery Boys & Girls – Robots & Drones Taking Over Your Food Delivery Job



July 22nd, 2025 by financetwitter



Subway trains in Shenzen, China, were invaded by an army of three dozen robots early last week. The roughly three-foot-tall robots developed by a subsidiary of Vanke, a large Chinese firm partly owned by the Shenzhen Metro, boarded and exited the trains to deliver packages to several 7-Eleven convenience stores. For obvious reasons, the 41 robots were put to test during off-peak hours.

The company believes the four-wheeled delivery robots could soon help stock shelves at around 100 7-Eleven locations. Vanke says its robots do all this by using a combination of robotics and AI (Artificial Intelligence) planning. The entire delivery process is managed by an AI-based dispatching system that handles scheduling and determines optimal delivery routes.

The planning system takes into consideration multiple factors like delivery requirements, cargo type, and subway capacity to develop the most efficient routes. Thanks to Shenzhen’s massive subway system, where it has more than 300 stations spread out across the megacity, the robots solved delay problems faced by human drivers such as limited parking and congestion.


As the Chinese government pushes an initiative to normalize the presence of robots in public spaces, the subway-riding robots are part of a citywide initiative in Shenzhen called the “Embodied Intelligence Robot Action Plan”, which aims to accelerate the adoption of robotics across multiple industries by 2027. Already, the world’s first robot half marathon saw about 20 humanoid robots raced alongside humans in Beijing in April.

Heck, China even hosted the world’s first humanoid robot boxing tournament recently, featuring robots developed by Unitree Robotics. It showcased robots mimicking human fighting techniques with impressive precision and agility. A leader in the robotics industry, China projects the market of humanoid robots to reach US$120 billion by 2030.


While delivery robots are still at the testing stage, more mature delivery services utilizing drones have become popular. Pioneers in the drone technology like Meituan and JD.com have been dropping off food and drink onto pickup kiosks by the street, which were purposely set up close to residential or office buildings. Customers who made the delivery order on the app will receive it on time.


Meituan, China’s most popular food delivery platform, has been developing drone delivery since 2017. The company engaged some 6 million gig delivery workers to deliver billions of orders by 2022. Since launching its service in 2021, Meituan has delivered more than 520,000 orders by drone(it’s worth noting that drones go to bed at 7 p.m.). Even though Amazon first proposed drone delivery as early as 2013, it fails where Meituan succeed.

Wing, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, has had more success operating drone deliveries on three continents. Amazon saw limited progress due largely to regulations and a lack of demand. What differentiates Meituan from these American peers is that it has chosen to offer drone delivery in the most challenging environment – dense urban neighbourhoods.

To make the service work in a dense city, Meituan doesn’t deploy drones to deliver directly to your doorstep. Instead, deliveries would be dropped off at kiosks, which can hold several packages at once. The process may be less convenient for customers, but it allows every drone to fly a predetermined route, from one launchpad to one kiosk, making the task of navigating urban areas much easier.


Here’s how it works – once the drone delivery system gets an order, a runner (human) goes to the restaurants to pick up the order and brings it to the launchpad. The runner places the food and drinks in a standardized cardboard box, weighs it to make sure it’s not too heavy, seals the box, and hands it off to a different worker who specializes in dealing with the drones.



The second worker places the box under a drone and waits for it to lock in. Everything after that is highly automated. The drones’ movements are controlled by a central algorithm, and the routes are predetermined. Because the workers know in advance, at every precise second, where each drone will be and how fast its speed is, the arrival time has a deviation of only two seconds.

In the U.S., Coco Robotics co-founder Zach Rash first started tinkering with robots while at UCLA in 2016. Nine years and US$110 million in funding later, Coco’s robot squad has shuttled more than 500,000 deliveries from restaurants in Chicago, Los Angeles, Helsinki and Miami. Startups such as Serve Robotics and Coco are gearing up to run thousands of food-delivery robots between them, serving customers on apps including DoorDash and Uber Eats.


With lasers to assess how far away people and objects are, as well as cameras on the sides, back and front to avoid running into people, Coco robots can travel up to 15 miles an hour, but typically go slower on sidewalks. For the past several months at Harold’s Chicken Shack in Chicago, restaurant workers have loaded up Coco robots with food instead of waiting for delivery drivers.

Just like how you track your courier service, customers track the robots on their delivery app and receive a notification upon arrival. Diners tap their app to unlock a hatch to grab their order, and then the robot goes on its way. The apps assess a delivery fee, as they would with a human courier. To prevent from being robbed, the Coco robots have lock systems to keep deliveries safe in compartments, inaccessible to passersby.

The delivery robots also have live camera feeds and alarms that go off if someone tampers with the robot. While the robots can operate autonomously, human operators and remote monitors oversee the robots in real time so they are ready to intervene when needed. Still, there were occasional problems such as when the machine ended up in a snow pile and needed rescue.




Meanwhile, drones run by the automated delivery company Zipline help transport blood for transfusions and vaccines in Africa. They are also preparing to take Jet’s Pizza boxes to people’s homes in Texas. Drone companies such as Zipline and Wing are putting their autonomous aircraft to use in food delivery, promising service in a fraction of the time needed by a car or bike.

The drone uses GPS along with sensors to target a precise point at a customer’s property. Traveling at around 150 to 300 feet in the air, the drone then lowers a tether toward its target containing the food order, using its sensors to navigate to the ground. It alerts the customer, deposits the food package and goes on its way. Customers pay around US$7 to US$10 for its drone delivery services, on top of the meal price.

Compared to delivery Meituan, China’s answer to DoorDash which reported roughly US$46 billion in revenues last year and has been running these drones for a few years, the U.S. is still very much in the early stages of retail drone delivery. Meituan’s solutions are tailored toward crowded cities, while Zipline, Walmart and Amazon’s approach is designed to tackle the suburban sprawl of American metro areas.


Unlike Meituan’s low-fee deliveries of just 4 Yuan (56 cents), Walmart’s offering is currently limited to what you can buy at Walmart and requires either a Walmart Plus membership or a US$19.99 delivery fee. Amazon charges Prime members US$9.99 for drone delivery and US$14.99 for everyone else. Besides, government regulation of airspace for autonomous drones is different between China and the U.S.

Getting the U.S. federal approvals to send private aircraft to deliver food and all types of goods has taken years – a nightmare – for drone companies. The drones also have limited service ranges based on their need to recharge. Another problem that is dragging the U.S. in drone food delivery – every residential property has its own layout that must be assessed to safely drop the order.



One reason people like drone delivery is that the service is more predictable, while the behaviour of delivery workers can vary. The problem of delivery workers stealing food from the customer’s order has become very serious. When customers complain to the restaurant that they didn’t receive the food they ordered, the restaurant bears the burden of correcting the problem.


Regardless, robots and drones are set to take over delivery jobs from human beings. To make matters worse, a lot of drivers don’t want small orders because they don’t pay as much, but those orders still need to be delivered. That’s where drones and robots are taking human jobs. And when robots take over the work of loading packages onto drones and changing their batteries, more jobs will vanish.