Delivery robots began as a small experiment in Estonia in 2014, started by two of the people who built Skype. Today those knee-high, cooler-sized machines roll through sidewalks in more than 80 cities, delivering food and packages for companies like Starship Technologies, Serve Robotics, Coco Robotics, and DoorDash's own fleet. The idea is simple: skip the human driver, and cut delivery costs.
But the sidewalk is a messier place than the roads self-driving cars usually get tested on. Robots have stalled on broken pavement, gotten stuck in construction zones, and in one case in Chicago, rolled into a bus stop and damaged it. More seriously, several people have been hurt, including a man in New Jersey who suffered a broken shoulder and a head injury after a robot collided with his bike.
The bigger friction point is who gets to use the sidewalk. Robots are legally treated as pedestrians in more than 20 states, which lets them share space with people walking, but also means they sometimes block the path for wheelchair users or people with limited mobility, raising accessibility concerns under disability law. San Francisco has capped how many robots can operate and confined them to quieter streets. Toronto banned them from sidewalks and bike lanes outright back in 2021. In Chicago, one alderman shut down two robot companies' plans to expand into his ward after 83 percent of residents at a community meeting said no.
That local pushback is happening at the same time the industry is projected to expand fast. One estimate from Transforma Insights counts around 28,000 of these robots operating this year. By 2035, it expects that number to reach 559,000.
Serve Robotics deployed its 1,000th robot in October. The company aims to reach 2,000 robots by the end of this year. Yet its entire revenue in 2024 came in under 2 million dollars, which shows how early this business still is despite the fast growing robot count.
That mismatch creates two real problems for any business touching last-mile delivery. First, insurance: when a robot injures a pedestrian, it is genuinely unclear whether the manufacturer, the software provider, or the company operating the fleet is on the hook, because most liability policies were never written with an unmanned sidewalk vehicle in mind. Second, labor: robots are not eliminating delivery jobs so much as changing them. Former drivers in Los Angeles are now working as "robot wranglers," swapping batteries and picking bots up after they tip over, earning between 21 and 26 dollars an hour, which is more stable than gig driving but still not enough to live comfortably in an expensive city.
The direction is clear even if the pace varies by city. Robots will keep growing in places with open sidewalks, suburbs, and university campuses, where the pushback is quieter. In dense cities with strong disability advocacy, expect more bans, caps, and city council fights, ward by ward, block by block. Any company planning to lean on robot delivery should treat local politics, not the technology, as the real bottleneck.