Robots have taken over Los Angeles.
It’s not just the AI-generated videos that have caused angst in Hollywood. Our streets are full of driverless Waymo vehicles, covered in more sensors and gadgets than the Batmobile. And our walkways are home to fleets of boxes on wheels, hurrying past pedestrians and navigating outdoor bar-hoppers as the robots deliver smoothies and keto-friendly salads.
And it’s only getting stranger. This month, Serve Robotics, one of the leading companies behind the food-delivery bots, deployed another 500 of them in 40 neighborhoods across the city, up from two neighborhoods in 2023. The other big company, Coco Robotics, founded at UCLA in 2020, has about 300 robots across the city and is looking to expand. Soon a region already known for its lack of walkability will have more obstacles for pedestrians to contend with.
The expansion has sparked consternation in LA and other US cities as residents debate whether our new neighbors are welcome. Neighboring Glendale is considering a moratorium on the bots; Chicago has also limited their expansion. Worse than the sidewalk frustrations, they mean fewer jobs for delivery drivers, even if some are human-controlled.
On the flip side, they don’t emit exhaust fumes or add to road traffic. And when they’re not accidentally smashing the glass on bus shelters, they achieve R2-D2 levels of cuteness, manipulating us with little nametags and blinking digital eyes. Is resisting the robots simply denying the future of food delivery?
Inspiring ‘both pity and hate’
On a recent Tuesday, workers and residents along Thoroughfare XJ-27, known to humankind as Sunset Blvd, described mixed feelings about the bots. In the Silverlake neighborhood, for instance, where many drinking and dining establishments seat people along the sidewalk, the devices can be disruptive.
Pazzo Gelato, a longstanding gelato and coffee shop, is one such place. Lula Ochoa, a barista and server, described the robots as a minor nuisance. “They can block [foot] traffic,” Ochoa says. “It gets congested in this area in between our tables. Kids will mess with them. They’ll sit on them.”
Further down the street is Millie’s Cafe, a diner-style breakfast spot that’s been around since 1926. For its first nine decades, LA sidewalks were largely robot-free. But recently things have been different – a particular issue at a restaurant whose outdoor seating is frequently packed. “We hate them,” said one staff member, who asked to remain anonymous, describing the robots. “They’re blocking the way and they’re hitting people.” Across the street at Kreation, a trendy destination for pressed juices, staff worry about job losses for drivers as well as challenges for people using wheelchairs.
On weekend evenings, roughly 80% of LA’s intimidatingly beautiful people gather outside the nearby wine bar Seco, creating a dense corridor of apparent models and actors that is difficult to navigate even without robots. David Potes, Seco’s executive chef, is all too familiar with the bots. Wandering into the crowds, “they get stuck and when they finally get through, people cheer”, Potes said.
His friends, he said, “both pity them and hate them”. The pity was evident, for instance, during recent rainstorms, when a delivery robot went viral as it struggled, postal-service style, to make its appointed rounds. “She’s doing her best, you guys,” says Mona Seresht, who recorded the clip. It’s virtually impossible not to assign personalities to the robots, whose behavior can be almost painfully adorable: when they are stuck at a crosswalk, unable to push the button for a “walk signal”, Serve robots will show a message to human bystanders: “Push crosswalk button for me?”
There is indeed something inspiring about the robots’ apparent determination, despite the knowledge that no actual grit is involved. And their ability to function in inclement weather could have safety benefits. Times when the weather is terrible, and driving is less safe, “are the exact times when everybody wants to order”, Zach Rash, co-founder of Coco, recently told the Los Angeles Times.
Potes understands people’s frustrations about the robots, but he is less bothered by them – they’re an inconvenience but part of modern life. “It’s change – the hardest thing for people to accept is change,” he says. And in the case of physical robots, that technological shift is “more in your face” than when it’s on a computer screen.
At the nearby sports bar 33 Taps, Joe McDonough, seated at one of the bar’s many outdoor tables, agreed that growing pains were inevitable. “Any new tech is going to have its bugs,” he said, pointing out that, at the opening of the landmark Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, an MP was hit and killed.
Delivery robots have thus far not killed any congresspeople, though some dangerous events have been reported. A New Jersey cyclist says a robot by the company Avride hit him and then started to leave the scene but was stopped by a witness; he reportedly suffered a head injury and broken collarbone. (A representative for Avride says its “fleet is programmed to operate in strict accordance with traffic laws and safety regulations”.) Video of a robot shattering the glass wall of a bus shelter in Chicago also made the rounds. And in a mildly dystopian incident, a Waymo collided with a delivery robot in LA in 2024, though neither was damaged.
“There’s always a little bit of push and pull when it comes to bringing in new technology like this to the city,” Ali Kashani, CEO of Serve, told the LA Times this month. “We try to be very engaged.”
A ‘robotability score’
“I think there’s going to be a lot of growth pains in deploying these devices in city centers,” said Steven Gehrke, an assistant professor in the department of geography, planning and recreation at Northern Arizona University. In a 2021 study, his team tracked the activity of new delivery robots on campus. They didn’t witness any injuries, but they noticed some challenging behavior among the robots: for instance, when a human crossed a bot’s path, it would stop – better than running into a pedestrian or cyclist, but still leaving an obstruction for that person to contend with. Gehrke recommends that cities find ways to reduce such mishaps – for instance, by barring robots from narrow or busy streets, or setting aside special areas where they can park when delivering food.
To that end, researchers at Cornell University have developed a “robotability score”, inspired by “walkability scores” on real-estate websites that rate how easy it is to walk around a neighborhood and that are informed by consultations with experts in robotics, urban planning and accessibility. The key to managing any robot deployment is respecting an area’s existing pedestrian patterns, says Matt Franchi, a doctoral student involved in the research. Is the area dense with people? Are they hurrying down the street as part of their commute, as they might on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, or are they ambling along and browsing at shop windows, as they might in the West Village?
“The score is very community-centric in the sense that the existing environment needs to be respected, or else the score degrades,” Franchi says. In that way, much of LA is probably better suited to the bots than a crowded walking city like New York. Franchi’s team, under the professor Wendy Ju, hopes the score will allow developers and urban planners to “meet in the middle” when making decisions about whether, and where, robots should be deployed.
Others opt for small acts of robot resistance. Not far from 33 Taps, a twentysomething was casually seated on a stationary delivery robot like a hunter displaying a recent kill. Petra, who only provided a middle name, had turned the machine off and was happy to demonstrate how to do so. LA is already “one of the worst cities to be a pedestrian in the world, so we don’t need things clogging the sidewalks”, Petra noted. “I don’t see the social benefit of these. What do they do? Like, sorry, just go to the restaurant. Pick up your food.”