Serve Robotics delivery robot shatters CTA bus shelter glass in Chicago

What happened

On a Sunday morning in late March 2026, a Serve Robotics delivery robot traveling along the sidewalk near Grand and Racine avenues in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood turned into the side of a CTA bus shelter. Security camera footage shows it breaking through a glass panel. Glass fell across the sidewalk. The robot stopped among the debris, later backed up and drove off. No one was hurt.

The video was viewed millions of times. Serve sent staff to clean up, and the shelter’s glass was replaced within a few days.

On Tuesday, March 24, a robot operated by a different company, Coco Robotics, broke through the glass of another bus shelter at North Avenue and Larrabee Street in the Old Town neighborhood. No one was injured in that crash either.

The system involved

Serve Robotics operates sidewalk delivery robots that mostly drive themselves, with people able to intervene remotely when needed. Serve and Coco were both operating in Chicago under a city pilot program for personal delivery devices that the City Council approved in 2022 and that runs through May 2027. Serve began deploying robots in Chicago in September 2025.

Investigation and response

Serve Robotics said its robot made impact with the glass, that its local team had cleaned the area and that it was investigating how the crash happened. It described such events as extremely rare and said it would cover the cost of the repair. In April 2026 it placed an advertisement on the repaired shelter apologizing to the neighborhood.

Chicago’s Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection and Department of Transportation said they were working with both companies to understand what happened and that the companies were responsible for repair costs; the shelters are maintained by the contractor JCDecaux. The local alderman, Walter Burnett, said his office had stressed the need for public safety and consistent monitoring of the robots. Another alderman, Daniel La Spata, temporarily barred both companies’ robots from his ward, according to Popular Science. The city created a 311 category for reports about delivery robots, and a petition calling for the program to be stopped gathered several thousand signatures.

Coco Robotics said its Old Town crash was the first of its kind in more than a million miles of deliveries, that it had opened an internal investigation and that it would pay for that shelter’s repair.

What is not established

Sources disagree on the date of the Serve crash: the Chicago Tribune and ABC7 Chicago describe it as happening on Sunday, which was March 22, 2026, while Popular Science gives Monday, March 23. Serve had not publicly explained in the sources reviewed why the robot failed to avoid the glass.