Coco Delivery Robots Swarm Lincoln Park Sidewalk, Video Draws 300,000 Views

A Lincoln Park runner's Monday morning route got blocked when she came across more than a dozen delivery robots flashing their lights and circling each other on the sidewalk, stopping foot traffic and drawing a crowd of onlookers.

Becca Ostien, who regularly runs along Clark Street and the Lakefront Trail, pulled out her phone when she spotted the cluster of autonomous machines operated by the delivery company Coco. She posted the video to her Instagram account with the caption "run route was crowded this morning." The clip has since been viewed more than 300,000 times and collected hundreds of comments, many from Chicagoans venting about the machines' spread across the city's sidewalks over the past two years.

The footage shows the robots, boxy units on wheels roughly the size of a large cooler, bunched together and turning in place with their indicator lights flashing. Pedestrians can be seen stepping around the jam to continue on their way.

Coco addressed the incident in a statement, saying a "sidewalk deployment error" caused several robots to reroute at the same moment as they left their station to begin their daily delivery runs, creating what the company called a temporary cluster. "That's not how our robots are designed to operate, and we understand the disruption it caused," the company said. Coco said its team identified and corrected the problem quickly, that the robots were cleared and back to normal operation within minutes, and that it has since fixed the routing behavior and added safeguards meant to prevent a repeat. The company apologized for the inconvenience to residents.

The Lincoln Park cluster is not the first time Coco's robots, or those of rival companies, have drawn attention for the wrong reasons in Chicago. Earlier this year, two delivery robots crashed into CTA bus shelters within days of each other, with one of the collisions caught on camera. One of those robots belonged to Coco; the other was operated by Serve Robotics, a separate company that runs its own fleet of sidewalk delivery machines in the city.

Coco began testing its robots on Chicago sidewalks last year, part of a broader rollout of sidewalk delivery technology in cities around the country. The robots are built to carry food orders from restaurants to customers over short distances, navigating sidewalks and crosswalks using cameras and sensors rather than a human driver. Serve Robotics operates a similar fleet in Chicago, and the two companies' robots have become a common sight on stretches of North Halsted Street and other commercial corridors on the North Side.

The growing robot population has not been welcomed by everyone. Pedestrians in Lincoln Park and Lakeview have complained for months about robots blocking curb ramps and clogging narrow sidewalks. The bus shelter collisions earlier this year added to those complaints, and residents have pressed the companies for more information on how the machines are tested and monitored once they leave controlled settings for public sidewalks.

Neither Coco nor city officials have said whether Monday's incident will lead to any change in how the company operates in Chicago. The city has not set specific regulations for sidewalk delivery robots the way some other cities have, leaving oversight largely to the companies themselves.

Coco says the routing error that caused Monday's cluster has been fixed and that new safeguards are now in place to keep it from happening again.