https://unherd.com/2026/08/the-invasion-of-the-delivery-robots/
There is, of course, no central tally of people harmed by these machines, but several have been injured or sent to hospital. The victims include a cyclist in New Jersey who broke his collarbone after being taken out by an Avride robot, and a pedestrian in Arizona who was knocked over and then injured again by the robot, she alleges, when she was on the ground.
In purely physical terms, the robots are formidable. A laden weight of over 50kg and a top speed of 10mph make larger examples quite frightening. Smaller, slower units have also been trialed, many limited to 4mph when they detect pedestrians, but even the more diminutive models have been filmed bothering people’s ankles, diving beneath the wheels of passing cars, and generally getting in the way. Humans are expected to dodge these machines when they plot uncompromising routes through crowds, sidestep them when they halt, or yank pets out of the way if the vehicles’ on-board AI hasn’t learned to detect a Yorkshire terrier. And when a robot pulls up at a pedestrian-controlled crossing, or otherwise gets stuck, its operator hopes that you will step in to assist.
To date, the pavement delivery drone experiment is going as badly as you’d expect, with predictable resistance from its unwilling, unconsenting human participants. But the scheme operators have turned to one of the oldest tricks in the consumer robotics playbook to mitigate public anger: cuteness. Almost all pavement delivery vehicles have smiley faces, exaggeratedly large anime-style eyes for headlamps, and affectedly unthreatening styling that resembles a child’s toy. Many have electronic voices capable of synthetic obsequiousness, humanoid nicknames emblazoned on their flanks, or large dot matrix screens on their fronts that can “emote” with basic expressions. Once the robot, called something like Cuthbert, has crashed into you, it can change its digital face to a sad one before whirring off with its cargo of bubble tea. This reflects the unlovably cutesy approach to accountability shared by most of the big operators of delivery drones. Following one of the Chicago bus shelter crashes, the startup Serve Robotics ran a local advertisement campaign that featured an anthropomorphic delivery robot displaying the self-deprecating message “Nasir is sorry” and “I took ‘breaking into the market’ too literally”. Corporate statements immediately following crashes are stiffly unrepentant and almost always downplay the severity of whatever went wrong.
https://archive.ph/2OG6J
