Chicago-based food delivery company Grubhub is expanding its partnership with Avride to launch a robot delivery pilot for customers ordering from restaurant chain Wonder’s Jersey City location.

The marks the first time Grubhub has offered autonomous delivery in its marketplace outside of college campuses, and the first time Wonder is bringing robot delivery to its customers.

During the pilot, customers can place orders from Wonder’s Jersey City location through the Grubhub platform as usual. If an eligible delivery address is within a set range of the restaurant, they will have the option to choose delivery via an Avride robot.

Wonder’s multi-restaurant model makes it an suitable partner to launch this pilot. Diners can choose from more than 20 different restaurant concepts including Alanza, Tejas Barbecue and Streetbird, with every dish made to order in a Wonder storefront and delivered fast and free. This combination of speed, variety and quality makes for a seamless experience that pairs with the efficiency of robot delivery.

Following the pilot, Grubhub plans to implement any learnings and expand autonomous delivery to additional markets nationwide.

“This pilot represents the next step in our mission to provide diners with fast, reliable and delightful delivery experiences,” said PJ Poykayil, senior vice president at Wonder (www.wonder.com) and Grubhub. “By combining Grubhub’s marketplace, Wonder’s culinary innovation and Avride’s advanced robotics, we’re delivering the future of convenience.”

The pilot will feature Avride’s most advanced delivery robots to date, guided by AI-powered autonomous driving technology, proven in difficult urban environments and diverse weather conditions to enable real-time navigation decisions with accuracy and reliability. Equipped with a precision-engineered four-wheel chassis capable of near-instant 180-degree turns and manoeuvrability, the robots ensure smooth, efficient deliveries even on the busy city sidewalks.

“We’re proud to be Grubhub’s trusted partner as they bring robot delivery beyond campuses for the very first time,” said Dmitry Polishchuk, CEO of Avride. “For Avride, this marks an important step in expanding robotic delivery. Going beyond traditional restaurant or grocery delivery, it highlights how seamlessly our technology can integrate with innovative platforms like Wonder’s, opening up new business verticals for autonomous delivery.”

Grubhub and Avride have already built a strong foundation through their campus partnerships over the past year. They have completed more than 100,000 robot deliveries across US campuses, including Ohio State University (www.osu.edu), home to the largest single-site robot food delivery programme in the USA, where a fleet of 120 robots delivers meals to students every day.

Grubhub (www.grubhub.com) is a US ordering and delivery marketplace dedicated to connecting customers with local restaurants, merchants and convenience retailers. It has over 415,000 merchants in more than 4000 US cities.

Avride (www.avride.ai) is an autonomous vehicle start-up headquartered in Austin, Texas, with additional R&D hubs around the world. The company develops and operates autonomous cars and delivery robots that share technologies and benefit from each other’s advancements. Since 2017, Avride has been building expertise in autonomous technologies to address needs and anticipate future demands. Its delivery robots have already completed hundreds of thousands of orders in the USA and overseas.