Axios: “As small robots proliferate on sidewalks and city streets, so does legislation that grants them generous access rights and even classifies them, in the case of Pennsylvania, as ‘pedestrians.’ Fears of a dystopian urban world where people dodge heavy, fast-moving droids are colliding with the aims of robot developers – including Amazon and FedEx – to deploy delivery fleets.”
“‘The sidewalk is the new hot debated space that the aerial drones were maybe three or five years ago,’ says Greg Lynn, CEO of Piaggio Fast Forward, which makes a suitcase-sized $3,250 robot called gita that follows its owner around. ‘There’s also a lot of people trying to deploy robots on bike lanes’ where the bots can go faster than on sidewalks, he said. States like Pennsylvania, Virginia, Idaho, Florida and Wisconsin have passed what are considered to be liberal rules permitting robots to operate on sidewalks – prompting pushback from cities like Pittsburgh that fear mishaps.”