DoorDash is building its own drone delivery business

The company’s foray into sidewalk bots and drones may seem well outside its core business model — an app that connects restaurants and customers with contractors who pick up food and deliver it to people’s doors. But DoorDash’s co-founder and chief product officer Stanley Tang said there is a common thread.

“We didn’t start with the question, “What’s the coolest autonomous tech we could make?” We started from first principles: What’s the actual customer problem that needs to be solved?” Tang wrote in a blog post on Wednesday announcing DoorDash Air.

In the company’s view, drones and sidewalk bots are part of the broader delivery network it is building.

The physical hardware — for instance, a 350-pound sidewalk bot or a drone — is important to this expanded view. But Tang argues that the operating system, particularly the software that can correctly determine what mode is used to deliver that burrito, sushi or pad thai, is just as critical.

DoorDash Labs has already developed software, called the Autonomous Delivery Platform, to handle the coordination challenge, according to Tang, and this operating system works with Dot, human delivery drivers and soon, the drone.

He noted that the company is tackling the full stack of challenges, from hardware and embedded systems to routing algorithms, and deciding in real-time whether human drivers, drones, or a sidewalk bot is the best option to dispatch a delivery.

This complexity was part of Tang’s recruitment pitch to engineering hires in the blog post.

“Most autonomy companies work on one layer. At DoorDash, you’re working on all of them simultaneously; nobody else is running all these systems on one network,” he wrote. “DoorDash is where the most interesting problems in autonomy are being solved today.”