The robot invasion is coming to your neighborhood.
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.
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.
Residents of Silver Lake — one of the neighborhoods most recently occupied by delivery bots from Coco and others — give the rolling bots mixed reviews so far.
This spring, Coco deployed around 10 food delivery robots to serve the neighborhood’s 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.
Silver Lake residents and retailers say their new neighbors are amusing and sometimes annoying.
On one of Silver Lake’s 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.
“The robot would’ve just stayed there forever if I did not cancel,” a former Silver Lake resident said in an interview on Reddit describing how a five-minute delivery turned into a comedy of errors. “I went without lunch.”
Coco chooses neighborhoods based on density, prioritizing areas with restaurants clustered together and short delivery distances as well as places where parking is difficult.
“We wanted to create this vehicle that’s very enjoyable for the merchants to use,” said Zach Rash, Coco’s co-founder. “It 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.”
He wouldn’t 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.
“With new neighborhoods, that’s going to happen more often than our more mature neighborhoods, because we’re still finding all the details of the area,” he said.
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.
He found them fascinating and endearing. He even made TikTok videos of them with music.
“I think it’s actually quite a nice addition” to the neighborhood, he said. “Makes me feel like we’re living in the future.”
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.
The neighborhood has already adopted them like local mascots, Attwell said.
“People kind of treat them almost like their dogs,” he said. “Kids really like them.”
Attwell has his own way to bond with the bots.
“I always pat them on the head for some reason,” he said. “I don’t know why, but I find them adorable.”
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.
The bots are more polite than the delivery drivers Ortiz deals with daily.
“DoorDash drivers and delivery drivers are sometimes knuckleheads” and tough to deal with, he said. “The robot is convenient, it doesn’t talk back or anything.”
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’s progress on the app, then unlock the cargo compartment with a phone code when it arrived.
“It was probably easier in the morning commute time to use a robot than a car or scooter,” Timmermann said.
Not every delivery goes smoothly. One Silver Lake restaurant worker recalled seeing the robots “glitching out in intersections,” causing traffic and rolling off curbs, falling over on their sides.
“The future is a lot dumber than I thought it would be,” the worker said.
Some people in the neighborhood see the bots as unfair competition.
Food delivery driver Julia Roggiero works mostly in West Hollywood and Silver Lake and says she has already noticed an impact.
She used to get five or six delivery requests an hour.
“Now, even when I’m in these areas like Santa Monica or Venice, it takes me an hour to get one or two, maximum three,” she said.
Roggiero has responded by diversifying into Lyft rides, but the shift represents a broader trend that worries gig economy workers.
“They do deliveries that we can do, so they are taking our income,” she said.
Rash says robots aren’t necessarily displacing human drivers.
“We have way more demand than we can handle right now,” he said. “The delivery market is enormous.”
Rash says the bots focus on the shortest trips while leaving longer, more lucrative deliveries to human drivers.
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 “probably five to 10 times bigger than any other autonomous vehicle fleet.”
“We are the cheapest way to deliver anything in a city today, and we can do that profitably,” Rash said.
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.
But the economic concerns remain real for workers.
Eric Ernst, an occasional Instacart delivery driver, says he doesn’t want his food delivered by a robot because it has to be taking work away from a human.
“It’s neat, you know, it’s cool. This is like ‘The Jetsons,’” he said. “But, you know, that’s a cartoon.”
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Piper Heath is a Los Angeles Times Business intern who previously reported for the Nevadan News and the New York Times. She is a Nevada native and an alumna of the University of Nevada, Reno.
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Caroline Petrow-Cohen is a Business reporter at the Los Angeles Times covering electric vehicles and aviation. She is a graduate of Duke University, where she studied journalism, English and environmental science and policy.
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