Sidewalk delivery robots

The sidewalk delivery cohort enumerates 10 entities across active commercial and verified wind-down records. Starship Technologies anchors the canonical scaled commercial position (multi-country US + UK + Estonia operations; millions of deliveries verified company-wide cap-flagged at 2023 primary milestone); Serve Robotics anchors the publicly-traded position (NASDAQ SERV; SoftBank-backed; Uber Eats partnership; LA + DFW + Vancouver commercial active). Coco + Kiwibot + Avride + Cartken + Ottonomy + Refraction AI + Delivers AI populate the broader commercial cohort across hardware-sale + RaaS-lease + captive-service business-model spectrum.

The framework reads the cohort honestly through the wind-down record: Amazon Scout (discontinued October 6 2022); FedEx Roxo (paused 2022); Tortoise (shut down 2023). The wind-down arc is editorial signal at the verification-posture layer, not weakness; structurally similar entrants face structurally similar operational + commercial challenges. Trade-press coverage that surfaces sidewalk delivery as "growing category" without naming the wind-down record is editorially imprecise.

Three business models structure the cohort: captive data-as-a-service (Starship + Delivers AI; maker operates fleet; customer consumes delivery output); hardware sale (Cartken Melco ~100-Hauler order; customers buy hardware + operate themselves); RaaS-lease (Ottonomy ~$999/month + Refraction AI; customers lease platform + operator support). Per-route operational scale + per-customer deployment specifics cap-flagged against primary sources; aggregator-reported counts disambiguated against operator + airport authority records.

Verified institutional depth lives at the registry's /sidewalk-delivery category where the per-entity models surface: Amazon Scout (wound-down anchor) + Cartken Courier (hardware-sale exemplar) + Refraction REV-1 (RaaS-lease) + Ottonomy Ottobot (RaaS-lease) + Delivers AI Robot (captive-service). Per-route delivery-drone overlap (Flytrex + Wingcopter 198) bridges into the autonomous-drones cohort across structurally adjacent last-mile-delivery surfaces.

For the framework canonical reference + canonical worked examples demonstrating the discipline operationally, see how DEPLOY verifies. For the canonical category umbrella that includes sidewalk delivery alongside the other physical AI cohorts, see what is physical AI.

For methodology pillar canonical references applicable to the sidewalk delivery cohort: the 4-way autonomy-boundary taxonomy (operator-supervised L4 + remote-teleoperator edge cases sidewalk autonomy-boundary mapping); the 9-tier source-quality rubric (operator-published + reputable-press source classification across sidewalk deployment claims).