Serve Robotics has announced a pilot partnership with Wing Aviation to expand the range of its autonomous food delivery without requiring restaurants to install new equipment to accommodate drone pickups.

Serve, which was spun out of the app-based delivery company Postmates in 2021, has been making Uber Eats food deliveries in Los Angeles for a few years now, using robots that look like autonomous shopping carts. Serve says its delivery robots can be a safer alternative to cars and help reduce traffic congestion as they operate primarily on sidewalks. Since they have a top speed of around six miles per hour, there should be little to no risk to pedestrians. But that approach also limits the robot’s ability to deliver food in a timely manner.

In addition, although Serve says its robots have a range of up to 25 miles while carrying 50 pounds of food, half of the delivery runs it makes in Los Angeles are “within two miles of a restaurant,” according to Dr. Ali Kashani, Serve’s CEO and cofounder.

The pilot partnership with Wing, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, is an attempt to expand that delivery range to a six-mile radius using a robot-to-drone multimodal delivery solution. Last year, Wing introduced its Wing Delivery Network, which includes AutoLoader stations where deliveries are picked up by its autonomous drones. Retailers can choose to install these AutoLoader stations in their parking lots, but that’s not an option for smaller restaurants.

The pilot partnership will initially roll out in Dallas, where “select Wing deliveries” will be picked up from a restaurant by one of Serve’s delivery robots. The robot will then bring it to a Wing AutoLoader station “a few blocks away,” according to Serve, where a drone will complete the delivery. Since Wing’s drones travel at up to 65mph and aren’t slowed by traffic lights or road congestion, the partnership will potentially bring a best-of-both-worlds approach to autonomous food delivery.

The service is expected to start within the next few months and will also help Wing expand its drone delivery services to merchants located in areas where space is limited and who don’t want to hire extra staff to act as go-betweens.

Gamers hoping to spend an evening in front of their PlayStation 5 or PlayStation 4 may be out of luck unless they enjoy single-player experiences (have you tried Astro Bot?). Sony’s gaming network is suffering a massive outage on Monday night.

The official PSN Service Status page confirms problems affecting everything, “Other, PS Vita, PS3, PS4, PS5, Web.” If it’s PlayStation — it’s not working. The most recent update tagged 9:21PM ET says that for gaming, “You might have difficulty launching games, apps, or network features. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.”

On my end, attempting to launch a game brought up “PS5 error Code WS-116522-7,” and the associated webpage from Sony tells me that “The system software is the update failed.”

Players can’t sign in, play multiplayer games, or play single-player games that need to connect and sign-in online first (offline games seem to be working fine).

There’s no word on what is causing the issue, and there is no estimated time for when it might be fixed. This doesn’t seem like it should be related to whatever bug was messing with the home screen artwork for PS5 games — a bug that was fixed only a few hours ago — but once we hear any additional information, we’ll let you know.

Amazon offered some pretty good deals ahead of its Prime Big Deal Days sale last week and continues to do so, but admittedly, we’ve seen most of these discounted prices before. Today’s deal on the Echo Hub is the exception, though, as Amazon is now selling it at a new all-time low price of $124.99 ($55 off). That’s a deal available only to Prime members, but other retailers like Best Buy and Target are also matching this deal in case you’re not signed up for Prime.

As a refresher, the Echo Hub is a smart home controller housed in a small, Fire tablet-like device you can choose to mount up on the wall. It makes controlling a smart home incredibly simple; all you need to do is tap its eight-inch touchscreen, and you can adjust smart thermostats, lights, and even security devices like video doorbells. What makes it even more convenient is its support for Matter and Thread, so you can also connect it to other smart home platforms beyond Amazon Alexa — though, admittedly, it integrates best with other Amazon devices.

All in all, the Echo Hub is a helpful little gadget that makes the smart home more intuitive for everybody in the household to navigate, from tech-averse relatives to young kids. It helps, too, that you can even use the Echo Hub to play music and stream videos, but without ads and a camera like an Echo Show smart display for extra privacy.