Self-Directed Delivery Robot Directs Itself Straight Through a Bus Shelter

Two robots. One week. Both drove through glass. And neither company can explain why.

On Sunday afternoon in Chicago's West Town neighborhood, a Serve Robotics food delivery robot struck the glass wall of a CTA bus stop shelter at Grand Avenue and Racine Avenue hard enough to shatter it. A witness, Bayard Elfvin, CEO of Centre Construction Group — whose office sits next to the crash site — was standing nearby. "I was surprised the thing could hit it that hard, and it went right through it," he told CBS News Chicago. The glass gave way completely. The robot kept moving.

Five days later, on Tuesday afternoon in Old Town, a Coco Robotics unit did the same thing — at the intersection of North Avenue and Larrabee Street, according to Block Club Chicago. Same mistake. Same result. No injuries in either incident, but the glass in both cases did what glass does when a 50-pound robot hits it at walking speed.

Neither Coco nor Serve has offered a technical explanation for why their respective robots drove through the glass, or why vehicles operated by different companies made the same potentially dangerous error, Block Club Chicago noted. Both said they are investigating. Neither can say more.

The incidents arrive at an awkward moment for sidewalk delivery robots, a category that has been quietly expanding across American cities while neighborhood resistance hardens. Chicago's pilot program — overseen by the city's departments of transportation and business affairs — will not continue past May 2027 without City Council approval, per Block Club Chicago. The city launched a 311 complaint category in December specifically for residents to report safety concerns about the robots, another mechanism that did not prevent this. Both companies are covering repair costs and coordinating with JCDecaux, which maintains Chicago's bus shelters.

The two companies take different approaches to autonomy. Serve's robots largely drive themselves, with humans stepping in when necessary, as WBEZ reported. Coco's robots are always virtually monitored by a human operator. Neither model prevented the collision. Coco's robots operate at roughly 5 miles per hour, the company told the Chicago Sun-Times — not fast, but apparently fast enough to shatter tempered glass. The Coco incident is, in this sense, the more troubling of the two: a robot with a human watching still hit the glass. What does that mean for the "supervised autonomy" label?

Coco told Block Club Chicago that across more than one million miles of deliveries, this was the first time one of its robots had collided with a structure like this. The company's mileage statistic requires context: on January 15, 2026 — roughly two months before the Chicago incident — a Coco robot experienced a hardware failure and became stranded on Brightline train tracks in Miami. The robot was struck and destroyed by a passing train, confirmed by Fox Business. Coco has not clarified whether that incident falls within its definition of a collision with a structure. The company raised $80 million in a Series B round in July 2025 backed by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, according to the Los Angeles Times. Serve Robotics — which has logged previous incidents in Los Angeles including one where a robot drove through police caution tape at what was initially believed to be an active crime scene at Hollywood High School in 2022, per 404 Media — deploys about 75 bots every day in Chicago, WBEZ reported. Serve has raised $93 million since 2021, including a $40 million round in April 2024, with plans to scale to 2,000 robots on city streets, according to Food On Demand.

Serve's Los Angeles track record has drawn sustained scrutiny. In 2023, the company provided footage from one of its robots to the Los Angeles Police Department, internal emails showed, per 404 Media. In Los Angeles, activists have been documenting Serve robots in various states of distress — knocked over, stuck, navigating poorly — footage they post online as a counterweight to company-run demos.

The resistance is not abstract. Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st) declined to allow robot companies to expand beyond a limited portion of his ward after overwhelmingly negative feedback from neighbors — 83.7 percent of respondents to his survey strongly disagreed with allowing the robots, WBEZ reported. City officials are watching. Ald. Walter Burnett (27th) stressed the importance of consistent monitoring to prevent harm to people, infrastructure, and property. BACP declined interview requests from WBEZ about the pilot program.

Serve's account of its response to the West Town crash was also disputed by an eyewitness on Reddit: the company said its team cleaned up quickly, but the Reddit user said a Serve employee loaded the robot and drove away without touching the glass; a JCDecaux worker arrived later to clear the debris.

The May 2027 council deadline gives this debate a natural horizon. What happens between now and then — more incidents, more data, more complaints to a system that already exists to collect them — will determine whether Chicago wants robots on its sidewalks at all. The glass keeps shattering. Nobody can say why.