Chicago's Sidewalk Delivery Robots: What You Need to Know

Lincoln Park resident Ainsley Harris noticed the robot before she noticed what it was doing. The boxy, pink and orange machine rolling down her sidewalk struck her, at first, as almost charming. “Kind of cute,” she later said. It belonged to Coco Robotics, a Los Angeles-based company that began deploying sidewalk delivery robots in Chicago neighborhoods in late 2024.

That initial goodwill didn’t last long.

As Coco’s presence expanded in Lincoln Park, Harris found herself navigating something more complicated than a novelty. A mother of two, she regularly manages a stroller, a labradoodle and a young child on a bike during neighborhood walks. The robots, multiplying on sidewalks that were never designed for them, turned routine outings into exercises in vigilance.

“The more time that I spent with them, and the more close contact I had with them, the more I began to kind of sour on them and having them in the neighborhood,” Harris, 42, said.

Her neighbor Josh Robertson took his frustration further. Last summer, Robertson launched a petition at nosidewalkbots.org calling on the city to pause the sidewalk robot program until Chicago releases safety findings and establishes clear rules governing how the devices operate. The petition has now gathered more than 3,700 signatures spanning over 50 ZIP codes across the city.

“Sidewalks are for people and should remain people first,” Robertson, 40, said.

The petition reflects a growing unease that has followed the rapid expansion of delivery robots into Chicago’s neighborhoods. Two companies are driving that expansion. Coco Robotics launched its Chicago operation through a pilot program in the 27th and 34th wards. Serve Robotics, also based in Los Angeles, entered the market last September, deploying 50 robots across much of the city’s North and West sides. Together, the two fleets represent a significant and accelerating presence on Chicago sidewalks.

The legal foundation for all of this dates back to 2022, when Lori Lightfoot, then serving as mayor, announced that the City Council had approved a Personal Delivery Device pilot program. That approval opened the door for local food establishments and tech companies to test robotic delivery on public sidewalks.

Four years later, what began as a pilot has grown into something residents in multiple neighborhoods are actively pushing back against. The signatures on Robertson’s petition come from more than 50 ZIP codes, a geographic spread suggesting the concern isn’t limited to Lincoln Park or the North Side.

The core tension is familiar to anyone who has watched new technology arrive in a city built long before that technology existed. Chicago’s sidewalks were laid out for foot traffic. Many of them are narrow, cracked from decades of freeze-thaw cycles, and already crowded with street furniture, parked bikes and pedestrians of varying mobility. Introducing autonomous machines into that environment raises practical questions that a pilot program approved four years ago may not have fully anticipated.

Robertson and others are pressing city officials to answer those questions before the fleets grow larger. They want documented safety data and a clear regulatory framework, not promises from the companies deploying the machines. Until that information is public, they argue, the program should stop expanding.

The companies involved have a different view of the situation. Their business model depends on scaling up, and Chicago represents a significant urban market. Serve Robotics alone brought 50 units online in a single launch. Neither company has faced a formal city-imposed pause.

For Harris, the abstract debate about technology and policy comes down to something more immediate. She lives on the sidewalks these robots now share, and she does not feel that the balance has been struck correctly. The cute factor wore off when she started calculating how much attention she had to pay just to keep her kids safe on a walk around the block.

Originally reported by chicago.suntimes.com.

Robertson’s petition keeps collecting signatures. City Hall has not announced any new regulatory steps. The robots keep rolling.