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Delivery robots had already proved to be a controversial fixture in Chicago, but are now shaping up to be a smash-hit in all the wrong ways.
Footage posted on the r/chicago subreddit — where posts complaining about delivery bots abound — shows one of these mobile lunch boxes showering the sidewalk with shattered glass after it allegedly rammed through the panel of a bus shelter, according to the uploader.
The video doesn’t depict the robot actually hitting the glass, so it’s technically possible that something else was responsible for this horrific act of vandalism. But there it is at the scene of a crime, as guilty-seeming as a pet dog blankly observing the sight of a broken vase.
For a few moments the robot jerks back and forth, as if it’s trying to shake off the glass it’s now covered in. Then it pulls off to the side of the footpath, where it’s promptly accosted by a man saddled with enough bags to clean out a bank vault, recording the carnage on his phone. One wonders if the bot continued to amble on afterwards, seeding the sidewalks of the Windy City with improvised caltrops.
The robot appears to be operated by Serve Robotics, an American firm that started off as a division of Postmates nearly a decade ago. The uploader claimed that an employee from the company came by to pick up the delivery robot, but neglected to clean up the glass. Later, the uploader claimed, an employee from the advertising monolith JCDecaux, which operates ad-plastered bus shelters across the country, came to tidy the mess.
Neither Serve nor JCDecaux responded to a request for comment.
The apparent accident captures one of the reasons why so many locals in Chicago and other cities remain resistant to delivery robots. They can clutter sidewalks and bumble into obstacles. They compete with human delivery drivers in the area. They’re packed with cameras that surveil their surroundings.
This isn’t even the first example of a delivery robot sabotaging transit infrastructure. In a role reversal of the bus shelter incident, a delivery bot operated by Coco was obliterated by a train after it malfunctioned and stopped in the middle of train tracks in Miami.
While delivery robots have been deployed at cities and university campuses across the country, they’ve faced notable resistance in Chicago, where both Coco and Serve have ramped up operations in recent years. In February, Alderman Daniel La Spata effectively banned the companies from operating in the city’s 1st Ward, citing a survey of residents which showed that over 80 percent of them were opposed to the delivery bots’ presence.
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