Delivery Robots Move From Jersey City Sidewalks to Philadelphia Streets
Delivery robots that became a familiar sight on Jersey City sidewalks over the past year are now carrying meals in Philadelphia, where Grubhub and Wonder now offer robot delivery from Wonder’s Rittenhouse food hall and other participating restaurants.
The Philadelphia rollout includes 25 Wonder restaurant concepts at the Rittenhouse location and nine additional Grubhub restaurants, Fox News reported. Restaurants must opt in to offer robot delivery, and participating merchants receive training and support at no additional cost, with more merchants expected to join over time, according to ROI-NJ.
For customers, the process stays inside the delivery app. A customer ordering from a participating restaurant can choose robot delivery if the address is within the service area, and the order travels in a locked compartment that the customer unlocks on arrival. Uber Eats customers can opt out of robot delivery, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
The robots are built by Avride, an Austin-based autonomous driving company. They stand just under three feet tall, are topped with a small red flag, travel at up to five miles per hour, carry up to 55 pounds, and navigate with cameras, sensors and lidar.
The Philadelphia expansion follows a pilot that began in October 2025 at Wonder’s Grove Street eatery in Jersey City. It was the first time Grubhub, the delivery marketplace Wonder acquired in 2024, offered autonomous delivery outside college campuses. Wonder says nearly 20 percent of deliveries from that location have since been completed by robots.
Jersey City was already a testing ground before Wonder. Uber Eats robot delivery there, also powered by Avride, now covers more than 100 restaurants, and Jersey City and Hoboken both run city-backed sidewalk robot pilot programs with Coco Robotics and Avride. Coco began its own Jersey City pilot in January 2026.
Philadelphia is not new to the machines. Uber Eats launched Avride robots in Center City in March 2026, after about a year of testing in the area, with dozens of restaurants participating and service offered from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.
The technology reached city sidewalks after years on college campuses. Grubhub and Avride have completed more than 100,000 robot deliveries at campuses across the country, including Ohio State University, where 120 robots make up to 2,000 deliveries a day.
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation classifies the machines as pedestrians under the state’s personal delivery device rules. The rules require them to yield the right of way to people on foot and on bicycles in pedestrian areas, and operators must notify a municipality at least 30 days before starting service. Municipal officials can bar the machines from areas where, after consulting the operator, they determine the robots would pose a hazard.
Not everyone has welcomed them. In Philadelphia, robots have been kicked, sat on and graffitied, USA TODAY and 6abc reported, drawing comparisons to hitchBOT, a hitchhiking robot destroyed in the city in 2015. Avride said the vandalism did not affect its expansion plans.
In April, a woman reported that an Uber Eats robot bumped into her from behind near 15th and Locust streets, leaving a scratch, Fox News reported. Avride acknowledged that its robot made minor contact with her while completing a turn.
On October 14, police arrested Carolyn Marvin, a 78-year-old retired University of Pennsylvania professor, after she stood in front of an Uber Eats robot on Filbert Street near Reading Terminal Market and repeatedly refused officers’ instructions to move, police said. She received a disorderly conduct citation and says she plans to fight it as a First Amendment protest against corporations displacing human delivery workers. She had been blocking robots for months, and it was the first time police became involved.
Whether the robots have eliminated delivery jobs has not been established in reporting so far. Uber has said the robots are meant to complement human couriers rather than replace them, while Marvin and other critics argue that each robot delivery is work that could have gone to a human courier.
More merchants are expected to join the Grubhub robot delivery program over time, the companies said. They have not said whether the Philadelphia fleet will grow to meet the new orders or whether the existing fleet will absorb them.