In March, within 48 hours, two autonomous delivery robots from two different companies veered off course, breaking glass at bus stops. These two serious incidents occurred amidst escalating tension between community members and lawmakers in Chicago, who oppose the presence of these robots. The crashes also happened just weeks after one of the manufacturers announced they were integrating a new mapping system, trained using Pokemon Go data, designed to improve navigation accuracy.

The first crash occurred on 23/3 in Chicago's West Town neighborhood. A Serve Robotics delivery robot approached a bus stop and crashed through the glass barrier, stopping with shattered glass covering it. After a few moments, the robot's eyes blinked, and it reversed a few meters, then continued on its way, shedding shattered glass onto the pavement.

In a statement shared with Popular Science, a Coco Serve spokesperson said a support team was dispatched to the scene immediately after the incident to clean up the broken glass. The company's Vice President stated this was 'not typical of our operations'. 'Over one million miles of deliveries, this is the first time one of our robots has collided with a structure like this,' the Vice President said, adding that delivery robots operate at a maximum speed of about 8 km/h, and safety is a top priority in their system design and monitoring.

These bus stop incidents occurred less than two weeks after Coco announced the deployment of a new image positioning system (VPS) from Niantic Spatial, intended to improve robot navigation accuracy. VPS data helps robots pinpoint their location by analyzing surrounding images, a technique designed to assist in areas with weak GPS signals. Niantic Spatial's VPS data is partly trained on millions of images collected from users playing the popular augmented reality game Pokemon Go.

These bus stop crashes are the latest in a series of unresolved issues surrounding the deployment of delivery robots across the United States. Images and videos on social media show robots from various brands getting lost, colliding with objects, struggling to cross roads, and even being hit by cars or trains.

In Chicago, incidents involving delivery robots have become so common that the city established a dedicated 311 hotline for residents to report safety concerns and complaints.

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