A man with cerebral palsy who uses a mobility scooter to travel experienced a blood-boiling episode when he kept getting cut off — by a robot.
In a video that’s gone viral on social media, Mark Chaney repeatedly attempts to drive his scooter around a sluggish delivery bot operated by a startup called Swerve Robotics as it randomly stops and occupies half a sidewalk in West Hollywood.
Even more strangely, the clanker courier — like certain maniac drivers on a highway — seemed to get swept into an episode of road rage.
When Chaney tries to pass, the bot swerves directly into his path, even brake checking him a few times. Before the video ends, it cuts him off, continues driving for half a second, then slams the brakes again. It happened so quickly that Chaney ends up rear-ending the machine.
“The way that it moved just seemed really intentional,” Chaney, a disability advocate, told the Los Angeles Times. “Everywhere that I moved, it blocks, and then it literally went across the sidewalk to cut me off.”
Chaney’s encounter sums up the frustrations that pedestrians — and sometimes motorists — experience with the autonomous robots that have taken over college campuses and cities across the US, including Los Angeles.
Don’t let their small stature fool you. While most of the time they’re more of a mild nuisance or a source of bemusement than a physical threat, they can still hurt people and cause accidents. Last year, a woman suffered a bad fall after she was struck by a robot from Starship, one of the leading delivery bot startups, that suddenly reversed into her path — and then backed into her again before fleeing the scene of the crime.
Meanwhile, they’ve also traded paint with and damaged cars. One bumbled into the path of and collided with a Waymo robotaxi, in a rare instance of autonomous vehicle on autonomous vehicle violence. Another plowed through a crime scene.
In a statement addressing this latest incident, Serve said its robots are designed to safely navigate around mobility devices and people with disabilities.
“We regret when we do not live up to that,” it said, per the LA Times.
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