SF Moves One Step Closer To Banning Delivery Robots From City Sidewalks, quote:
Their fears regarding safety may not be all that unfounded, either. Last July, a Knightscope autonomous security robot ran over a toddler's foot at Stanford Shopping Center. A later report from the company said that the machine tried to avoid the child at first, but stopped when it couldn't. Still, they apologized for what they called a "freakish accident." Following that, just over a year later, a Knightscope security robot drove itself into a fountain outside an office building in Washington, D.C., according to Slate. Both of these "hiccups" resulted in a litany of criticism regarding autonomous robots, and while the technology used in these security bots differs from those used in the delivery bots on San Francisco sidewalks, they still serve as evidence that there's so much to work to be done before the technology can be deployed en masse.
