Delivery Robot Dogpiled on the Streets of Philly
The City That Keeps Breaking Robots (And What It Means for the Future of Delivery)
Philadelphia has a history with robots, and it is not a happy one.
In 2015, the city destroyed hitchBOT — an experimental hitchhiking robot that had successfully traveled across Canada and parts of Europe — within two weeks of its arrival. Its head was removed, its arms broken off, and it was left on the side of a road. The researchers who built it called the destruction deliberate and targeted. Philly's reputation in robotics circles became something between a cautionary tale and a dark joke.
That reputation is being tested again. Uber Eats launched a delivery robot pilot in Center City Philadelphia in early March, deploying small autonomous robots made by Avride. The robots travel at roughly 5 miles per hour, have a one-to-two-mile delivery radius, and use LIDAR and cameras to navigate. Avride says the cameras auto-blur faces and license plates to protect privacy.
The rollout has not been smooth. Video that circulated online over the St. Patrick's Day weekend — originally posted by Philadelphia street photographer Hugh Dillon and later shared on Reddit — appeared to show a delivery robot being kicked, sat on, and graffiti'd with the words "DESTROY ME PLZ" by a group of onlookers. (The original video has since been deleted; the account of the incident cannot be independently verified beyond social media posts.) The robot, according to the poster, continued on its route afterward.
Philadelphia is not alone in its skepticism. In Chicago, where delivery robots from Serve Robotics and Coco Robotics flooded sidewalks late last year, more than 800 residents signed a petition calling for the program to be paused. A 33-year-old man told the Chicago Tribune in February that he needed stitches near his left eye after tripping over a delivery robot at night. Residents reported being forced into busy streets and colliding with bicyclists. Chicago's city council ultimately moved to ban the robots from large portions of the city.
Similar complaints about sidewalk congestion and near-misses have mounted in Los Angeles. The Philadelphia video is crude, but it sits at the gentler end of the spectrum compared to what has happened elsewhere. Nobody welded the Avride robot shut or threw it in a river. They kicked it, wrote on it, and moved on.
There is a version of this story where the robots win — where the novelty fades, the complaints diminish, and autonomous delivery becomes as unremarkable as a mailbox. That is the version the companies need to be true. Uber Eats has completed hundreds of thousands of robot deliveries across more than 10 U.S. cities through partnerships with Avride, Serve Robotics, Coco Robotics, and Cartken. The economics are compelling for the companies: a delivery robot does not require a tip, does not have a bad day, and does not file for unemployment. The cost savings at scale are real, even if the upfront capital expenditure is significant.
The robots have the right technology for the task. They may have the wrong cities — or perhaps the wrong city strategy — for a smooth introduction. Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles are dense, walkable, and full of people with strong opinions about what belongs on the sidewalk. The companies deploying there are learning, in public, that the gap between a robot working in a parking lot and a robot working on a Saturday night crowd in Center City is not a small one.
The hitchBOT incident in 2015 was a single robot destroyed in a single city. What's happening now is something more structural — cities are beginning to push back as a pattern, not an anomaly. That may be the more important story.
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