Serve Robotics released a delivery robot which drove through a bus stop shelter in the West Town neighbourhood of Chicago, throwing glass across the sidewalk. Years later, on the same date, a second robot, which was piloted by Coco Robotics, struck another bus shelter in Old Town.
The two crashes that happened both in late March 2026 came as the pilot program was still going on in the city, and the petition among the population was already gaining momentum. Some 3,700 individuals had already signed a petition to get the program finished before the second crash was even reported.
Chicago's Delivery Robot Pilot Program: What the City Approved
In 2022, Chicago passed its pilot program of sidewalk robot delivery, allowing two companies to operate autonomous robots on Chicago sidewalks through May 2027. Advertising permission under that condition applies both to Serve Robotics, an autonomous delivery company based in California that spins out of Uber Eats, and to Coco Robotics, which runs remotely piloted delivery robots.
The two firms were very fast in recovering their companies following crashes. All of them took the responsibility and paid for the cost of repairing the damaged bus shelters. Representatives of both Serve Robotics and Coco described the accidents as being occasional and safety is a primary organizational focus.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has recognized that the program needs an assessment, but his office has not declared suspension or a formal assessment of the program due to the crashes. The pilot was approved by the city under the old administration, and the conditions present mean that the operation can proceed without incident-by-incident council approval.
The ward level has received criticism of that arrangement. Alderman Daniel La Spata, who represents the North Side, in part, informed the constituents that 83 percent of those surveyed are firmly against sidewalk delivery robots. La Spata has taken action to limit the spread of robots in his ward on that basis. The position places the local elected authority in a head-on collision with a city-wide program that was passed prior to the present wave of complaints becoming reality.
One of the vocal residents of Chicago, Josh Robertson, had reasons to believe that the robots are responsible in taking people off the street, where they belong. According to National Today, Robertson wrote, delivery robots oblige pedestrians to vacate areas that are reserved for human beings.
Sidewalk Mapping Gaps: The Infrastructure Problem Behind the Crashes
Among the aspects of the Chicago events that have been relatively seldom subject to examination is what the robots themselves actually know about the pavements on which they walk. The primitive mapping issue in the delivery robot companies is found in the fact that the infrastructure of the sidewalks in American cities is not well-documented. In contrast to road networks, which have ten years of standardized data collection, sidewalks are different block to block in their width, surface condition, curb cut location, and the fact that they may have fixed objects such as bus shelters and utility poles.
This mapping loophole is an established technical issue in the entire autonomous sidewalk delivery sector, and not a vice of one company in the Chicago crashes. Robots that are being used in a mapping that has not been done thoroughly are also more likely to run into barriers that their navigation software has not predicted.
The comparison to Burleson, Texas, is educative. The city introduced robots that used sensors in order to survey the access of the sidewalks for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which surveyed surfaces three times faster than human surveyors. The Burleson effort does not consider the collection of sidewalk data as an afterthought. The pilot program that was publicly recorded in Chicago does not seem to contain a similar infrastructure-wide mapping requirement prior to implementation.
Both Serve Robotics and Coco Robotics did not publicly address the question of the fullness of their sidewalk mapping data in Chicago before it was published.
A Growing Market, an Unresolved Public Trust Question
The financial stakes behind sidewalk robotics are substantial. The global delivery robot market was valued at approximately $2 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $7 billion by 2030, according to Asia Economic Daily, though that figure could not be independently verified from a second source. Companies operating in this space face pressure to scale quickly, which makes cities like Chicago, with an active multi-year permit, a valuable operational proving ground.
The employment dimension of that expansion has surfaced in public commentary around the Chicago incidents. Critics of the program have raised concerns about what widespread autonomous delivery means for gig-economy workers who currently handle the same routes on foot or by bicycle. Neither the city nor the operating companies have published an analysis of that displacement effect as part of the pilot program's evaluation framework.
Public sentiment, at least as measured by the petition and La Spata's constituent survey, runs against the program at significant margins. The city has not published its own data on complaint volume, near-miss incidents, or the total number of collisions that have occurred since 2022. That absence of centralized incident data means residents, aldermen, and journalists are working from an incomplete picture when assessing whether the crashes in West Town and Old Town represent isolated malfunctions or a pattern.
Serve Robotics and Coco both operate under the same 2022 permit framework, and that framework does not expire for more than a year. The petition signatories and at least one alderman want the program ended before then. The companies argue that incidents are rare. The city has not yet said publicly which data it is using to adjudicate between those two positions.
