Camron Bridgford was eating dinner outside at a Miami restaurant when she saw a strange sight: two sidewalk delivery robots in a standoff, each one blocked by the other.
“One finally had to back out and let the other one through,” says Bridgford, senior principal at Cityfi, who worked on a 2021 landmark sidewalk delivery robot pilot program in four cities.
In the five years since that program, sidewalk bots, dubbed Personal Delivery Devices or PDDs, have gotten smaller and slower as the market consolidates, according to Bridgford. But the PDDs are still far from perfect: Even as they roll into new cities like Vancouver, bots are still smashing into glass bus shelters and getting stuck in snow.
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