Video of Coco delivery robot swarm in Lincoln Park goes viral as residents vent frustrations

A video of a swarm of Coco delivery robots in Lincoln Park has gone viral as residents vented frustration about traffic jams on sidewalks and other areas pedestrians need free access to.

Becca Ostien took the video Monday morning.

"I run along this road all the time, so I spent a lot of time on these, right around these few blocks near Lincoln Park," she said.

Not long into her morning walk, Ostien ran into at least a dozen Coco delivery bots in a traffic jam along North Clark Street.

"And I was like, what is that? Is that all Cocos?" she recalled. "They were swarming. They didn't seem to have anywhere to go."

She said the ones in the middle seemed to be trying to get out, while the ones on the end were just stationary on the sidewalk.

"Without agile feet, no one could have gotten by," she said.

Food delivery robots rolled into Chicago under a pilot program, but there's been pushback and even petitions to pause the program. There have also been other documented traffic jams and at least two crashes into bus shelters.

Coco Robotics apologized for the traffic jam that blocked Ostien's walk. In a statement, a spokesperson called it a "sidewalk deployment error" in which several robots leaving the station to start their daily routes were rerouted at the same time, causing a Coco cluster.

The issue was resolved in minutes.

"If this is happening with their robots, maybe they're not designed to work that way, but they are working that way," Ostien said.

She just wants to walk without another run-in with a robot.

"It's important that these sidewalks stay for pedestrians in this area."

Coco said it has solved the issue and added safeguards to prevent it from happening again.