The robot navigated the crowded sidewalks of Jersey City with ease, cruising between pedestrians, over jagged curb cuts and around trash cans until it suddenly ran into a conundrum: an S.U.V. stopped in the middle of the crosswalk.
Pedestrians casually sidestepped the obstruction. But the robot was trained to yield to anything in its path, so it froze, seemingly contemplating what to do.
After the S.U.V. moved, the robot resumed its journey, rolling a few more blocks until it met Ken Reyes outside his apartment. Mr. Reyes tapped an app on his phone to unlock the robot’s hatch. He was pleased that his lunch — a chicken cutlet sandwich from an Italian restaurant — had arrived hot and with what he considered a discount.
“They don’t charge a tip when it’s the robot,” he said.
Roughly the size of a large picnic cooler on wheels, delivery robots have become ubiquitous in Jersey City since their arrival last year. Owned by two tech competitors, Coco Robotics and Avride, that have partnered with apps like Grubhub and Uber Eats, the Jersey City fleet is part of a national effort to disrupt food delivery. Neither tech company would say exactly how many robots have been deployed, but Avride did confirm that the fleet was the largest it had deployed in a city.
The robots, which are powered by artificial intelligence, have drawn a mix of affection, acceptance and annoyance, and raised questions about public safety and the livelihoods of bike-mounted delivery workers.
Though New York City has not embraced delivery robots — state law prohibits motorized vehicles on the sidewalks and self-driving vehicles on the streets — the reception in New Jersey has been decidedly warmer.
A yearlong pilot program to test the robots in Hoboken was launched last month. Officials there hope the fleet will reduce street congestion from double-parked delivery cars in a city where about 60,000 people live in one square mile.
During the pilot, which Emily Jabbour, Hoboken’s mayor, called “a controlled experiment,” Coco Robotics and Avride can each operate 10 robots in a small zone around the city’s train station. Hoboken will receive about $6,000 from the two companies for the right to use its public spaces during the pilot.
The robots travel at the pace of a brisk walk, using sensors and cameras to avoid obstructions. When they run into a major roadblock, they can call for help, allowing an employee to intervene remotely and control the machines, said Yulia Shveyko, the head of public affairs for Avride.
Some residents have delighted in the robots’ humanlike behavior. One TikTok user posted a video of three of them stopped at a crosswalk in Jersey City and observed, “It looks like they’re having a quick little chat or a group meeting.” On social media, the robots’ struggles — getting stuck on a snowy sidewalk, being tipped over, tumbling down stairs — come off as endearing.
But for Charlotte Austin, 30, who lives in a high-rise building in Jersey City with her infant daughter and husband, the robots can be annoying — especially when she’s pushing a stroller.
“They see you coming and they stop in the middle of the sidewalk so they don’t hit you,” she said. “With a stroller, you have to go around them, but you can’t because they’re blocking the whole sidewalk.”
This kind of conflict has proved more than inconvenient for at least one cyclist. Last October, Conor Shannon, 32, an actuary who lives in Jersey City, was commuting home on his bike when he collided with an Avride robot in the crosswalk. He flew off his bike, suffering a broken clavicle and a concussion. After the crash, with Mr. Shannon sprawled on the street, the delivery robot simply continued on its way and had to be restrained by bystanders, he said.
Ms. Shveyko of Avride declined to comment about the crash, but said in an email that “safety remains our top priority as we scale our operations.”
Mr. Shannon said he planned to sue the company, arguing that the robots are hard to see because they’re short and move quickly. “I don’t believe they should exist in the current state they are in,” he said. “It’s just going to result in more injuries.”
Delivery robots are now deployed in at least a dozen U.S. cities, as well as on many college campuses. And there have been strong reactions to their presence. A critic for The Los Angeles Times wrote about her contempt for them in a column with the headline “Am I the Only One Who Hates Delivery Robots?” In Philadelphia, residents have kicked them over, sat on top of them and wrote “DESTROY ME PLZ” on one.
And in Chicago, a long-running petition is calling for a pause on the use of delivery robots until there is more data about their safety and effect on jobs.
Earlier this year, delivery robots smashed into two bus stop shelters in Chicago, leaving behind shattered glass. Serve Robotics, the company behind one of the machines, offered a cheeky apology: a billboard featuring a robot named Nasir who says, “I took ‘breaking into the market’ too literally.”
Sarah Kaufman, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, is not surprised by the cautious rollout of the delivery robots in Hoboken. She said the resistance to them represented “two disconcerting trends: the loss of human jobs and the physical embodiment of A.I., which itself is experiencing a significant backlash.”
Still, she admitted to being charmed by their presence on a recent trip to Miami, where the robots have been deployed for at least five years. “They just looked cute lumbering around,” she said. “One of them had a little screen with heart eyes.”
On a recent Jersey City lunch hour, dozens of robots crisscrossed the streets downtown. Dogs barked at them. Some people affectionately patted them. An Avride robot finished a delivery then appeared to take a nap, a “ZZZ” floating across its LED screen. (Avride created the sleeping animation to assuage worried bystanders who had emailed the company, fearing the robots were lost or abandoned, Ms. Shveyko said.)
The robots rolled past food delivery workers who had congregated with their bikes outside a strip of restaurants. They paid little attention to the devices.
Some restaurants actually prefer to work with the robots. Nina Colon, general manager of Left Bank Downtown, a sports bar and restaurant in Jersey City, met one on the sidewalk and placed two burgers and a coke inside. The robots are more patient, she said. “Some of the drivers will be antsy when they get here because they want their order right away,” she said. “The robot just waits.”
Russell Basile, who owns branches of Basile’s Pizza in Jersey City and Hoboken, said his only gripe was that the robots were too small to hold his pizza boxes. He has to cut the pies in half and put them in two smaller boxes. But he prefers the robots to humans because he said delivery workers could be “sloppy.”
“The robots just do their job,” he said. “Get in, get out and get to their destination.” Still, Mr. Basile worries about the workers. “People ain’t making money,” he said. “It takes away jobs.”
Coco Robotics and Avride say demand for restaurant deliveries is growing faster than the number of human couriers, and they are filling the gap.
Sitting on his neon yellow electric bike in Jersey City, Abdelrahman Metwaly, a 31-year-old courier, shrugged off his new autonomous colleagues. On his bike, he can travel up to 20 miles per hour, while the robots typically top out at five m.p.h.
“We are much faster than him,” Mr. Metwaly said, gesturing at a nearby robot that had stopped at an intersection to avoid another robot. “They are not smart enough.”
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