The robot invasion is coming to your neighborhood.<\/p>\n
Coco Robotics, a startup born on the UCLA campus, is about to carpet-bomb the city with hundreds of additional adorable delivery bots recently enhanced with some of the same AI that powers ChatGPT. <\/p>\n
The company has been testing bots around the city for years, and it is at last confident enough in its technology that it plans to grow tenfold in the coming year, adding 9,000 bots to its current fleet of around 1,000 across the country.<\/p>\n
Residents of Silver Lake \u2014 one of the neighborhoods most recently occupied by delivery bots from Coco and others \u2014 give the rolling bots mixed reviews so far. <\/p>\n
This spring, Coco deployed around 10 food delivery robots to serve the neighborhood\u2019s restaurants and residents. The pink, rounded machines represent the latest expansion for a company that started as a dorm room project at UCLA in 2020 and now operates hundreds of robots from Santa Monica to downtown.<\/p>\n
Silver Lake residents and retailers say their new neighbors are amusing and sometimes annoying.<\/p>\n
On one of Silver Lake\u2019s many hillside streets, a robot delivering a burger from the Window took an unexpected route. Instead of following the most direct path, it turned up a steep hill and tried to climb some stairs before getting stuck. The machine sat motionless while somewhere a customer waited for lunch that would never arrive.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe robot would\u2019ve just stayed there forever if I did not cancel,\u201d a former Silver Lake resident said in an interview on Reddit describing how a five-minute delivery turned into a comedy of errors. \u201cI went without lunch.\u201d<\/p>\n
Coco chooses neighborhoods based on density, prioritizing areas with restaurants clustered together and short delivery distances as well as places where parking is difficult. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Coco Robotics delivery robots are queued up and ready to roll July 23, 2025, at Kreation Kafe in Santa Monica.<\/p>\n
(Robert Gauthier \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted to create this vehicle that\u2019s very enjoyable for the merchants to use,\u201d said Zach Rash, Coco\u2019s co-founder. \u201cIt can deliver a lot of their orders without making our cities more congested, without taking up parking spaces or adding more cars to the road.\u201d<\/p>\n
He wouldn\u2019t share which neighborhoods will be next but asked that people be patient with the bots. They get lost and stuck more often in places they are still getting to know, Rash said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWith new neighborhoods, that\u2019s going to happen more often than our more mature neighborhoods, because we\u2019re still finding all the details of the area,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Benjamin Attwell remembers the morning it began. He was working at MidEast Tacos, an Armenian-Mexican fusion restaurant, when six robots were unloaded from a truck on the corner of Maltman Avenue and Sunset Boulevard.<\/p>\n
He found them fascinating and endearing. He even made TikTok videos of them with music. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s actually quite a nice addition\u201d to the neighborhood, he said. \u201cMakes me feel like we\u2019re living in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
The robots are designed to inspire affection. With their rounded edges and compact bodies, they navigate the neighborhood like cyber pets, stopping for pedestrians and maneuvering around obstacles.<\/p>\n
The neighborhood has already adopted them like local mascots, Attwell said. <\/p>\n
\u201cPeople kind of treat them almost like their dogs,\u201d he said. \u201cKids really like them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Attwell has his own way to bond with the bots. <\/p>\n
\u201cI always pat them on the head for some reason,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know why, but I find them adorable.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Coco food delivery robot technician Hugo Delgado services units July 23, 2025. Delgado said he is responsible for maintaining nearly 25 robots in the Santa Monica area.<\/p>\n
(Robert Gauthier \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
Kreation Organic, a health-focused cafe that started using Coco robots in April, said they have been good for business. Senior operations manager Jefferson Noe Ortiz said robot deliveries have increased sales as families are drawn to the novelty. The restaurant handles about five robot deliveries per day. Ortiz expects that number to rise. <\/p>\n
The bots are more polite than the delivery drivers Ortiz deals with daily.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoorDash drivers and delivery drivers are sometimes knuckleheads\u201d and tough to deal with, he said. \u201cThe robot is convenient, it doesn\u2019t talk back or anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bob Timmermann, a retired librarian, used a robot to send doughnuts to his former colleagues at the Los Angeles Central Library. The process was straightforward: Order through Uber Eats, watch the robot\u2019s progress on the app, then unlock the cargo compartment with a phone code when it arrived.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was probably easier in the morning commute time to use a robot than a car or scooter,\u201d Timmermann said.<\/p>\n
Not every delivery goes smoothly. One Silver Lake restaurant worker recalled seeing the robots \u201cglitching out in intersections,\u201d causing traffic and rolling off curbs, falling over on their sides.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe future is a lot dumber than I thought it would be,\u201d the worker said.<\/p>\n
Some people in the neighborhood see the bots as unfair competition. <\/p>\n
Food delivery driver Julia Roggiero works mostly in West Hollywood and Silver Lake and says she has already noticed an impact. <\/p>\n
She used to get five or six delivery requests an hour. <\/p>\n
\u201cNow, even when I\u2019m in these areas like Santa Monica or Venice, it takes me an hour to get one or two, maximum three,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Roggiero has responded by diversifying into Lyft rides, but the shift represents a broader trend that worries gig economy workers. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey do deliveries that we can do, so they are taking our income,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Rash says robots aren\u2019t necessarily displacing human drivers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have way more demand than we can handle right now,\u201d he said. \u201cThe delivery market is enormous.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rash says the bots focus on the shortest trips while leaving longer, more lucrative deliveries to human drivers.<\/p>\n
Coco operates more than 1,000 robots across multiple cities, spanning from Santa Monica and Venice through West L.A., Westwood, Mid-City, West Hollywood, Hollywood, Echo Park, Silver Lake, downtown, Koreatown and the USC area. With more than half a million deliveries completed and millions of miles driven, Coco is targeting 10,000 robots in production next year, a number Rash says would be \u201cprobably five to 10 times bigger than any other autonomous vehicle fleet.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are the cheapest way to deliver anything in a city today, and we can do that profitably,\u201d Rash said. <\/p>\n
The company makes money through platforms such as Uber Eats for completing orders, direct payments from merchants for deliveries, and leasing parts of the fleet to restaurants and advertising services.<\/p>\n
But the economic concerns remain real for workers.<\/p>\n
Eric Ernst, an occasional Instacart delivery driver, says he doesn\u2019t want his food delivered by a robot because it has to be taking work away from a human. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s neat, you know, it\u2019s cool. This is like \u2018The Jetsons,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cBut, you know, that\u2019s a cartoon.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The robot invasion is coming to your neighborhood. Coco Robotics, a startup born on the UCLA campus, is…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":88481,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[7910,38318,1582,276,2451,59321,13654,7236,59324,2961,224,5337,20038,8145,8463,59320,9503,59322,22662,59323],"class_list":{"0":"post-88480","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-area","9":"tag-bot","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-city","13":"tag-coco","14":"tag-delivery","15":"tag-downtown","16":"tag-food-delivery-robot","17":"tag-la","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-losangeles","20":"tag-neighborhood","21":"tag-order","22":"tag-restaurant","23":"tag-robot-invasion","24":"tag-santa-monica","25":"tag-silver-lake","26":"tag-west-hollywood","27":"tag-zach-rash"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114907923949948011","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}