More than a dozen Coco delivery robots piled up on a stretch of North Clark Street near Lincoln Park in Chicago, blocking the sidewalk and forcing pedestrians to weave through a cluster of stalled machines flashing their lights with nowhere to go.
Runner Becca Ostien, who regularly passes through the area, filmed the scene and described the robots as “swarming.” She said someone without agile feet would have struggled to get past them. The video spread quickly online, and commenters raised a pointed concern: what happens to a disabled pedestrian, or someone using a wheelchair or walker, when a robot pileup takes over the sidewalk?
One commenter called the scene “an actual nightmare” for a disabled person.
Coco Robotics, the company behind the robots, admitted the fault. In a statement, Coco said a “sidewalk deployment error” caused several robots to reroute simultaneously as they left their station for their daily routes.
“That’s not how our robots are designed to operate, and we understand the disruption it caused.”
The company said it identified and fixed the problem within minutes, clearing the robots and restoring normal operation. Coco says it has since corrected the routing behavior and added safeguards to stop it from happening again, calling the incident rare against a backdrop of tens of thousands of trips completed over two years of operating in Chicago. The company estimates its deliveries have saved consumers roughly $500,000, created skilled fleet-maintenance jobs, and reduced vehicle traffic.
This is not the first friction point for Chicago’s delivery robot pilot program. Residents have circulated petitions calling for the city to pause the program, and there have already been documented crashes involving the robots and bus shelters.
Public sidewalks are shared infrastructure, and they don’t bend to accommodate a fleet of machines that failed to navigate properly. A blocked sidewalk is a minor annoyance for an able-bodied pedestrian who can step around it. For a wheelchair user, a blind pedestrian, or a parent pushing a stroller, it can be a hard stop.
Coco points to a separate effort on accessibility: a partnership with BlindSquare, a GPS app used by blind and partially sighted pedestrians. Coco says its robots log sidewalk hazards, such as fallen e-scooters or broken curb cuts, and feed that data into BlindSquare, which delivers spoken alerts in 26 languages about hazards roughly 10 meters ahead. BlindSquare users can also report when an obstacle has cleared, letting Coco update its routing maps in real time.
“Robots built to navigate the pedestrian environment have a responsibility to improve it for everyone who shares that space.”
That partnership doesn’t erase the core problem the Chicago video exposed: a machine meant to help clear hazards for disabled pedestrians cannot itself become the hazard. As delivery robot fleets expand beyond college campuses into grocery delivery and dense city neighborhoods, more people will encounter them on ordinary walks, and cities will have to decide how much sidewalk space autonomous machines are entitled to when their software fails.
The public sidewalk was never supposed to be a proving ground for a company’s routing software. Until these systems can guarantee they won’t box in the people who have the least room to maneuver around them, the burden of proof belongs on the companies deploying the robots, not on the pedestrians forced to navigate around them.
