A West Hollywood man with cerebral palsy is raising accessibility concerns after a scooter collision with a food delivery robot — a moment he captured in a viral video that has drawn more than 20 million views across TikTok and Instagram as of Saturday afternoon.
Local therapist and advocate Mark Chaney said the encounter with the Serve Robotics cart happened on Sept. 13 near the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station, when he was on his way home from a procedure.
“I was really frustrated because I was in a lot of pain that day,” Chaney told KTLA on Saturday. “I was like, ‘I just want to get home.’” He added that he uses a mobility scooter occasionally for distance because of frequent falls and injuries.
Chaney said he began recording the robot after it nearly struck him once, and then continued swerving in his path as he traveled down the sidewalk.
“The robot had been acting strangely… I tried to give it lots of room to pass, and it cut me off. Then it hit the brakes right in front of me, and I bumped into it,” said Chaney, adding that the impact caused his scooter to jolt backward. He said that the robot appeared to reverse into him, a claim Serve Robotics disputed in its response.
In an email response to Chaney, the company wrote that the robot “did not drive in reverse at any point” and was operating autonomously at the time. “When the robot braked decisively, this caused some recoil,” the company said, adding that predicting human movement in real time is “a complex process” and likening it to two people approaching a doorway and hesitating to pass one another.
“In this case, just as you adjusted your path for the robot, the robot was also trying to adjust its path for you. Ultimately, as you got closer to the robot, it determined that the safest option was to come to a complete stop,” a Serve representative stated. “It’s the challenge of predicting someone else’s movements in real time without direct communication.”
Chaney said the response left him feeling dismissed. “What really frustrated me is it felt like they were saying it was my fault,” he said. “They didn’t take accountability — they just brushed it off.”
While Saturday’s incident was the first time one of the devices made contact with him, Chaney said he regularly has to stop, detour or step aside to avoid delivery robots while navigating West Hollywood sidewalks. On narrow paths, he has even had to step into the street on crutches to let one pass. “They’re not as intuitive as people think,” he said. “If you’re not testing them against wheelchairs, scooters or walkers, then you’re not designing for everyone.”
For Chaney, the risks go beyond inconvenience. “If I had been on crutches that day, I would have fallen,” he said. “For me, a fall isn’t just inconvenient — it could mean weeks of recovery.”
In its email response, Serve also told Chaney that it is “fast-tracking” the launch of an Accessibility Council to gather feedback from disability advocates and emphasized that its goal is for robots to move “as safe as possible and in ways that are graceful and predictable.”
In the meantime, Chaney hopes the viral attention from the social media video forces companies to do more than promise councils and reviews. “At minimum, they need to include people with disabilities in the room when these systems are designed,” Chaney said. “If we’re not there, it’s not built for us.”
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