Charlie Snodgrass used to be a gig driver, delivering burritos and pad Thai around Los Angeles. Today, he handles the robots that do his old job.
He is one of the first of a new class of workers — a robot wrangler — paid to care for and train AI-powered bots as they learn to work in the real world.
At 5:45 a.m., in a small warehouse in West Hollywood, Snodgrass tends to rows of identical delivery robots standing wheel to wheel, 150 in all. The quiet morning was punctuated by the high-pitched swoosh sounds of the robots powering up and the occasional beep.
Each robot is topped with a colored disc cone — a visual triage system for identifying the status of each machine. A green cone indicates the robot is checked, its sensors are clean and its battery is charged. An orange cone means it’s waiting for tech support.
Snodgrass is in a rush. Before 7:15 am, he has to load 27 healthy robots from Serve Robotics into a U-Haul truck and deliver them around L.A.
Snodgrass walks up to a robot named Singta and begins his morning check: Battery charged to at least 70%? Yes. External damage? None. Food bin clean and locked? Check. Software updates installed? All good.
He swaps the pink cone on top — indicating it was yet to be checked — with a green one and unplugs the charger.
“Singta is on duty,” the robot display reads.
Snodgrass is one of the behind-the-scenes humans who flies into action when the bots are in trouble. The cute little bots need cleaning, charging, maintenance and sometimes rescue. They regularly get stuck and knocked over.
Last month, in downtown L.A., wranglers responded when a Waymo collided with a delivery robot. Early this month, another bot was recorded struggling through flooded roads after heavy rains.
“She’s doing her best!” said the person recording the video. “She is doing her best, you guys.”
As autonomous delivery robots proliferate, more wranglers — Serve Robotics calls them field operations executives — will be needed.
“They are the kind of jobs that scale with the robots,” said Ali Kashani, chief executive of Serve Robotics, which operates 2,000 delivery robots in 20 cities. “If you build more robots, you’re going to still have people whose job is to operate the fleet.”
One of Serve’s competitor, Coco Robotics, aims for a seven-fold increase to 10,000 delivery robots by the end of the year. Serve recently acquired Moxi, a robot hospital assistant with arms that deliver supplies inside hospitals.
Autonomous cars at Waymo and Zoox, robots that walk on two or four legs, and independent robot arms, which are expected join people in their workplaces and homes, also need caretakers.
Whether these semiskilled robot wrangler jobs will see an in-step increase as these companies scale up operations remains to be seen. Companies are reluctant to share their human-to-robot ratios. Amazon is reportedly planning to avoid hiring 500,000 people through automation by 2033.
Companies such as Instawork, a staffing platform for blue-collar jobs, said it is building a large pool of wranglers to meet the labor demand for the promised widespread deployment of physical AI.
“It’s really impossible to roll these things out without humans,” said Instawork CEO Sumir Meghani.
In 2025, the number of public job postings with the “robot technicians” role increased by 75% compared with the previous year, according to an analysis by Erik Stettler, chief economist at Toptal, a company that connects professionals in a variety of industries with organizations. Stettler’s analysis also found that robotics technicians earned a median salary of $64,000, half the median salary of $123,000 for robotics engineers.
Snodgrass’ wrangling job, in comparison, pays $24 to $26 an hour, about $54,000 a year at the top end.
Serve started operations in L.A. in 2019 and was spun off from Uber, before listing on Nasdaq in 2024. Its robots deliver food up to 2.5 miles away for Doordash and Uber Eats.
At the West Hollywood depot, the robots line up in rows of four, looking like a mini marching band. They each fly a little orange flag marked “S” for Serve.
Anthony Pimentel uses a fresh wet wipe to clean the sensors on each robot. If any of the lenses are smudged or covered, it disrupts the robot’s spatial awareness.
In online forums, delivery drivers discuss ways to stop the robots from taking their jobs, and a consistent top suggestion is to put a sticker over the sensors to disable them.
Pimentel plugs a cord into a robot, then uses a controller that looks like a video game joystick to enter a code to take control and walk it up the ramp into the U-Haul like a dog on a leash.
Inside, his boss notifies DoorDash and Uber Eats that their robots will start taking orders soon.
At 11:10 a.m., the robot labeled Siddhant reports that he’s stuck. He’s been waiting at a crosswalk with a breakfast order, but can’t proceed because the light isn’t turning green. Some crosswalks require pedestrians to push a button to stop the traffic. Since the bots have no arms, they need human assistance.
To get the attention of passersby, Siddhant makes a plea on its digital screen: “Push crosswalk button for me?”
If there aren’t any helpful humans around, the robot wranglers are deployed.
Serve’s robots are designed to look cute and nonthreatening — with rounded corners, big eyes and names — to make humans more likely to feel comfortable around them and even help them sometimes. Including Miranda and Jason, Capri and Tanisha, each on-duty robot has a unique human name from a mix of ethnicities.
They are always trying to learn how to politely navigate crowds on their routes, said Lauren Burke, senior vice president of operations at Serve.
“It’s a constant evolution of being one with sharing the sidewalk,” she said.
Pimentel said one of his top priorities was handling “drop-off assists,” when customers don’t come outside to collect the food and the human wrangler has to ring the bell to deliver it.
Other common chores include freeing robots stuck on rough pavement and manually lifting those that end up on their sides. Sometimes, they enter zones with poor network connections, and the wranglers have to go pick them up.
For a period, almost every robot crossing the corner of Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue was getting pushed over. Serve had to station wranglers nearby to flip them back onto their wheels.
Acceptance has risen recently as more people get used to seeing delivery robots scooting across the city.
“When I first started, it was like 1 in every 5 robots was coming back with graffiti or having been tampered with in some way,” said Matthew Wood, 39, the supervisor of the West Hollywood depot, who started a year ago. “Now it’s more like 1 in every 50.”
Outside the warehouse, 10 robots are lined up, ready for duty. When one starts moving, a Serve agent stops it by breaking into a dance. The robot responds by wiggling all its wheels and emitting a five-second joyful alarm.
The dance feature can be triggered only by the human piloting the robot, and cannot be triggered by members of the public. Although Serve has experimented with giving the delivery robots a speaking voice and interacting with the pubic, it doesn’t plan to make all robots conversational.
Nearly half a million people follow the TikTok account Film the Robots LA that documents videos of delivery robot goof-ups.
Pimentel shares recent instances of what he called “peaceful vandalism” in which protesters put stickers on the robots near Silver Lake to denounce President Trump’s immigration policies.
“Sometimes we keep them,” Pimentel said, pointing to stickers on the office fridge. “They’re not too bad.”
One of the most cinematic incidents was an attempted robot kidnapping.
Two individuals lifted one of the 200-pound bots into the back of their truck. Luckily, Serve detected the emergency and one of its employees took over control of the robot remotely and had it speed off the back of the truck. It landed on its wheels and was able to escape.
The morning wrangling drew to a close at 1 p.m., as Pimentel returned to the depot. The dashboard on the laptop of his supervisor, Snodgrass, titled “FAD” — field agent deployment — showed his hard work for the day. Pimentel closed six tickets, including sensor cleaning, rescuing a robot stuck in a crack and assisting in a few food drop-offs.
Two doors down from the warehouse is Serve’s mechanic shop, where Juan Salinas is crouched on a garage stool and fixing up “Christine.” A suspension problem was causing her to veer off course. Other robots wait their turn for a repair job, some of them with their guts on the floor.
Salinas, who was an automotive mechanic, started at Serve as a field agent, cleaning and charging the robots, and was promoted to robot technician.
Once the robot is fixed up, Salinas plugs a joystick into the back panel and walks her over next door to hand it off to a wrangler, who plugs it in to charge.
At 2:10 p.m., Snodgrass starts wrapping up his shift, plugging some in for recharging and updating the list of healthy robots to be deployed for the next shift — the dinner rush. They sometimes get up to 20 tickets an hour in the evening. He says he feels grateful to build a “career in tech.”
He says he is not worried about being replaced by robots and even jokes that there could be a robot revolt where the bots take over the world.
“I think I’ve done enough to get in their good graces,” he said. “I try to treat them nicely.”
The post A new caretaker class? As robots go mainstream, there’s a job they’re creating instead of eliminating appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
