Decades of science fiction had us convinced we would be zipping around in flying cars by now. What we actually got are cooler-sized robots crawling down the pavement and drones humming overhead to drop off someone’s midnight burrito. The idea of a little machine bringing your groceries to your door sounds fun the first time you hear it. But the charm has a short shelf life, and in neighborhoods where these things are now a daily presence, a lot of people have simply had enough.
Delivery robots are compact self-driving machines built for short trips – food, medicine, groceries, small packages. A customer orders through Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, or a retailer’s own platform, and the nearest robot goes to collect it. They navigate using GPS, cameras, LiDAR, radar, and AI, with human operators available remotely when the software runs into something it cannot figure out on its own. Serve Robotics, Starship Technologies, and Coco run thousands of these machines across cities in the US and parts of Europe, and the companies are quick to highlight the environmental and economic upsides. People sharing the pavement with them are less enthusiastic. The robots’ slow things down, break down in the middle of walkways, occasionally bump into people, and the tall safety flags some of them carry have reportedly smacked pedestrians in the process.
In places such as Chicago, London, and Sheffield, robots have been kicked over, shaken for the food inside, spray-painted, and thrown from bridges. It turns out people have strong feelings about uninvited machines taking over their streets.
Drones bring a different set of problems because they operate above neighborhoods rather than through them, but the pushback has a familiar feel. Amazon Prime Air, Wing, and Zipline now offer delivery in selected areas where some orders arrive within minutes. People living under those routes say the novelty disappears quickly and the buzzing does not. Residents have also raised concerns about camera-equipped aircraft making repeated passes over private backyards, and many simply dislike the idea of machines hovering above their homes throughout the day regardless of what the cameras are actually used for.
There is also the jobs question, which is not going away. Labor unions including the Teamsters have been direct about it — replacing human drivers with robots and drones is a threat to people’s livelihoods and, they argue, to public safety. For delivery workers, each new machine deployed is not a cool piece of technology. It is a job that no longer exists.
The backlash has pushed companies and city governments to take the question of public trust more seriously. According to Serve Robotics, Amazon Prime Air, Wing, and others in the industry, the long-term future of autonomous delivery probably has less to do with how sophisticated the technology gets and more to do with whether everyday people actually want it around.
