When University of California Berkeley allowed the startup Kiwibot to pump its campus full of delivery robots in 2020, their welcome was anything but warm. While some students and staff seemed to appreciate the bots, plenty more did not, taking it upon themselves to vandalize, harass, and knock the fellas over at every opportunity.
As Kiwibot CEO Felipe Chavez observed at the time, out of the company’s first 80,000 deliveries the bots finished on campus, about 1,600 involved incidents of vandalism. At a cost of $2,500 per Kiwibot, it’s safe to say the damage adds up quick.
Now, as thousands more have flooded the streets, sentiments toward delivery robots seem to have changed very little. If anything, they’ve only gotten worse.
Over the weekend, two Uber Eats delivery robots in Sheffield, UK suffered some extensive vandalism. Images shared by the Star show the pair of bots caked in spray painted graffiti reading “off our streets.”
“It’s a shame to see a few people spoiling things for everyone else and damaging a new service for local people,” a spokesperson for the robot’s manufacturers, Starship Technologies, told the outlet. “We’ve reported the incidents to South Yorkshire police, we take this sort of criminal damage very seriously.”
That comes off the heels of an incident across the pond in Philadelphia, when late night revelers kicked, sat on, humped, and vandalized another delivery robot over St. Patrick’s day weekend. Weeks earlier in Los Angeles, an area man shared a photo of a delivery robot anointed with what appears to be a loaded diaper.
“Stumbled across the perfect microcosm of downtown LA today: a high-tech autonomous delivery robot smeared with a pile of feces,” he wrote.
Examples of petty beatings also abound, like footage from December showing two guys in Leeds, UK tossing a delivery robot into a bush, or video of one bot cracked open and left for dead on a Los Angeles sidewalk.
As more bots flood city streets across the US and Europe, it seems some are taking an active role in stunting their progress.
More on delivery robots: There’s Something Incredibly Weird About Two Delivery Robots Crashing Through Glass Bus Shelter in Chicago Within a Few Days of Each Other