A Sidewalk Delivery Robot Allegedly Hit a 73-Year-Old Parking Attendant Multiple Times. A Phoenix Jury Will Decide Who Pays.

Trudy Perez was on duty at an Arizona State University parking garage on September 22, 2023, when a six-wheeled Starship Technologies food delivery robot crossed the sidewalk in front of her. She waited. She crossed behind it. The robot then struck her multiple times, according to a local report and the civil suit she later filed.

The ASU Police Department case report (23-2385) records a four-inch gash on Perez's arm, back pain, and ongoing mobility problems. The report is marked closed. Perez, then 73, is now suing Starship Technologies in Maricopa County Superior Court. The first court date is set for February 2027. The trial will be the first open-court jury test of how Arizona assigns fault when a remote-piloted sidewalk delivery bot injures a bystander.

Arizona law has answered part of the question. Sidewalk delivery robots are classified as "personal delivery devices" with "the same rights and responsibilities as pedestrians." The same statute requires their operators to carry general liability insurance, capped at $100,000. The category defines who the device "is" in a crash: not a vehicle, not a motor, and not an animal. A pedestrian.

The plaintiff's filing pushes against that classification at the seam. The suit alleges the Starship unit was piloted by an off-site employee who failed to "exercise control" during the incident. The filing treats the device less like a pedestrian and more like a piece of equipment operated by a human worker, with the duty of care that follows a forklift driver or a crane operator.

Starship's legal response, as summarized in the same KJZZ reporting, denies liability and asserts two defenses: that Perez had pre-existing injuries, and that she was comparatively negligent in how she crossed the sidewalk. The company has not, in the excerpts available, addressed the "exercise control" allegation directly. Whether a jury accepts the "pedestrian" frame, the "remotely piloted equipment" frame, or some hybrid will set the template for every future case.

Most pedestrian-vs.-driver cases turn on duty, breach, and causation against a person behind the wheel. The Starship model, as the filing describes it, is operator-mediated: a human pilot watches through cameras and steers from a remote terminal, with the device carrying out the action in the physical world. The duty-of-care frame then follows the operator, the company's training, and its kill-switch policy. Arizona's "personal delivery device" statute does not, on its face, address remote piloting.

A $100,000 insurance cap sets the rest of the picture. The figure covers general liability, not bodily injury awards, and the statute was passed in 2018, when these robots were a new category on Arizona sidewalks. A jury award in a multi-injury case could exceed the cap without anyone in the case acting in bad faith, because the statute sets a floor on insurance, not a limit on what a court can find.

Starship Technologies operates sidewalk delivery at US universities including ASU. The February 2027 trial will be the first jury test of any of these deployments. Whatever the verdict, the case will measure the gap between Arizona's "pedestrian" statute and the operator-mediated reality on the sidewalk, in front of a jury that has not seen this question before.

The trial date is February 2027. The category question is now in court.