Chicago Delivery Robots: What You Need to Know

According to initial reporting by the Chicago Sun-Times, delivery robots from two Los Angeles companies are now a routine sight on Chicago’s North and West sides, and residents aren’t waiting for City Hall to catch up.

Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics, both headquartered in Los Angeles, have deployed fleets of autonomous sidewalk couriers across significant portions of the city. Coco’s distinctive pink and orange machines first rolled into the 27th and 34th wards during late 2024 as part of a pilot program. Serve Robotics followed last September, adding 50 robots to many of the same corridors. The combined count of sidewalk delivery machines in Chicago has since climbed into the hundreds.

The legal groundwork goes back to 2022. That’s when then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the City Council signed off on a Personal Delivery Device pilot program, the first formal authorization for this kind of technology on Chicago streets and sidewalks. What the ordinance didn’t include was a permanent regulatory framework. No hard rules on fleet size. No mandated safety reporting. No clear standard for who gets the right of way on a 48-inch sidewalk shared by strollers, wheelchairs, and bicycles. Critics say that’s the problem.

Ainsley Harris, 42, lives in Lincoln Park and uses those sidewalks every day. She remembers seeing a Coco robot for the first time and finding it charming. That feeling didn’t hold. “The more time that I spent with them, and the more close contact I had with them … the more I began to kind of sour on them and having them in the neighborhood,” Harris said. She’s navigating those sidewalks with a stroller, a dog, and a kid on a bike. The robots don’t make that easier.

Her neighbor Josh Robertson, 40, turned his frustration into a petition. He launched nosidewalkbots.org to pressure city officials into pausing the sidewalk robot program until Chicago produces safety data and establishes enforceable deployment rules. By March 27, 2026, the petition had gathered more than 4,000 signatures. Those signatures came from residents spanning more than 55 ZIP codes, stretching from Rogers Park down to Bridgeport, from Humboldt Park east to Hyde Park. That’s not a Lincoln Park grievance. It’s a city-wide one.

“Sidewalks are for people and should remain people first,” Robertson said.

Robertson’s hope is that the breadth of that signature map forces aldermen and the mayor’s office to act before the next expansion wave arrives. Both Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics have been clear about their intentions. Chicago is a growth market for both companies, and neither has indicated it’s done adding machines to the fleet.

The complaint that keeps surfacing isn’t just about aesthetics or the strangeness of sharing a block with a boxy orange courier. It’s structural. Chicago’s older residential streets, particularly across the North Side, weren’t built with a third category of traffic in mind. The Americans with Disabilities Act requires accessible pedestrian routes, and advocates for people with disabilities say robots occupying narrow sidewalk passages can compromise that access in ways the 2022 ordinance simply didn’t anticipate.

City Council hasn’t moved a regulatory update since Lightfoot’s pilot authorization four years ago. Meanwhile, the fleets have grown. Coco planted its machines in the 27th and 34th wards first. Serve Robotics came in last September with 50 units and expanded the footprint. The 4,000-plus signatories Robertson has collected now represent one of the more organized community pushes on a tech-policy question the council has so far treated as a low-priority item.

Robertson isn’t calling for a ban. He’s asking for a pause, safety findings, and rules that exist on paper before the next 50 robots show up. Harris, meanwhile, says her initial curiosity has given way to something harder to shake. She liked the idea of the robots before she had to share a sidewalk with them every morning. Now she doesn’t.

The petition sits at nosidewalkbots.org. As of March 27, it’s past 4,000 signatures and still climbing.